Adam Smith goes mobile : managing services beyond 3G with the digital marketplace

The next generation of mobile communications systems is expected to offer new business opportunities to existing and new market players. A market-based middleware framework has been recently proposed whereby service providers, independent of network operators, are able to tender online service contracts to network operators in a dynamic and competitive manner. This facilitates a seamless service provision over disparate networks in a consumer-centric manner. Service providers select network bearers according to the network operators' ability to meet the QoS target, which in turn is influenced, among other things, by user's price and quality requirements. The benefits of this proposal are the complementarity of numerous network resources, the decoupling of services and networks in a self-organising distributed environment, and increased competition to consumers’ advantag

A personal networking solution

This paper presents an overview of research being conducted on Personal Networking Solutions within the Mobile VCE Personal Distributed Environment Work Area. In particular it attempts to highlight areas of commonality with the MAGNET initiative. These areas include trust of foreign devices and service providers, dynamic real-time service negotiation to permit context-aware service delivery, an automated controller algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks, and routing protocols for ad hoc networking environments. Where possible references are provided to Mobile VCE publications to enable further reading

zCap: a zero configuration adaptive paging and mobility management mechanism

Today, cellular networks rely on fixed collections of cells (tracking areas) for user equipment localisation. Locating users within these areas involves broadcast search (paging), which consumes radio bandwidth but reduces the user equipment signalling required for mobility management. Tracking areas are today manually configured, hard to adapt to local mobility and influence the load on several key resources in the network. We propose a decentralised and self-adaptive approach to mobility management based on a probabilistic model of local mobility. By estimating the parameters of this model from observations of user mobility collected online, we obtain a dynamic model from which we construct local neighbourhoods of cells where we are most likely to locate user equipment. We propose to replace the static tracking areas of current systems with neighbourhoods local to each cell. The model is also used to derive a multi-phase paging scheme, where the division of neighbourhood cells into consecutive phases balances response times and paging cost. The complete mechanism requires no manual tracking area configuration and performs localisation efficiently in terms of signalling and response times. Detailed simulations show that significant potential gains in localisation effi- ciency are possible while eliminating manual configuration of mobility management parameters. Variants of the proposal can be implemented within current (LTE) standards

A survey of energy saving techniques for mobile computers

Portable products such as pagers, cordless and digital cellular telephones, personal audio equipment, and laptop computers are increasingly being used. Because these applications are battery powered, reducing power consumption is vital. In this report we first give a survey of techniques for accomplishing energy reduction on the hardware level such as: low voltage components, use of sleep or idle modes, dynamic control of the processor clock frequency, clocking regions, and disabling unused peripherals. System- design techniques include minimizing external accesses, minimizing logic state transitions, and system partitioning using application-specific coprocessors. Then we review energy reduction techniques in the design of operating systems, including communication protocols, caching, scheduling and QoS management. Finally, we give an overview of policies to optimize the code of the application for energy consumption and make it aware of power management functions. Applications play a critical role in the user's experience of a power-managed system. Therefore, the application and the operating system must allow a user to control the power management. Remarkably, it appears that some energy preserving techniques not only lead to a reduced energy consumption, but also to more performance

Energy-efficient vertical handover parameters, classification and solutions over wireless heterogeneous networks: a comprehensive survey

In the last few decades, the popularity of wireless networks has been growing dramatically for both home and business networking. Nowadays, smart mobile devices equipped with various wireless networking interfaces are used to access the Internet, communicate, socialize and handle short or long-term businesses. As these devices rely on their limited batteries, energy-efficiency has become one of the major issues in both academia and industry. Due to terminal mobility, the variety of radio access technologies and the necessity of connecting to the Internet anytime and anywhere, energy-efficient handover process within the wireless heterogeneous networks has sparked remarkable attention in recent years. In this context, this paper first addresses the impact of specific information (local, network-assisted, QoS-related, user preferences, etc.) received remotely or locally on the energy efficiency as well as the impact of vertical handover phases, and methods. It presents energy-centric state-of-the-art vertical handover approaches and their impact on energy efficiency. The paper also discusses the recommendations on possible energy gains at different stages of the vertical handover process

Integrating personal media and digital TV with QoS guarantees using virtualized set-top boxes: architecture and performance measurements

Nowadays, users consume a lot of functionality in their home coming from a service provider located in the Internet. While the home network is typically shielded off as much as possible from the `outside world', the supplied services could be greatly extended if it was possible to use local information. In this article, an extended service is presented that integrates the user's multimedia content, scattered over multiple devices in the home network, into the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of the Digital TV. We propose to virtualize the set-top box, by migrating all functionality except user interfacing to the service provider infrastructure. The media in the home network is discovered through standard Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), of which the QoS functionality is exploited to ensure high quality playback over the home network, that basically is out of the control of the service provider. The performance of the subsystems are analysed

Energy-efficient vertical handover parameters, classification and solutions over wireless heterogeneous networks: a comprehensive survey

In the last few decades, the popularity of wireless networks has been growing dramatically for both home and business networking. Nowadays, smart mobile devices equipped with various wireless networking interfaces are used to access the Internet, communicate, socialize and handle short or long-term businesses. As these devices rely on their limited batteries, energy-efficiency has become one of the major issues in both academia and industry. Due to terminal mobility, the variety of radio access technologies and the necessity of connecting to the Internet anytime and anywhere, energy-efficient handover process within the wireless heterogeneous networks has sparked remarkable attention in recent years. In this context, this paper first addresses the impact of specific information (local, network-assisted, QoS-related, user preferences, etc.) received remotely or locally on the energy efficiency as well as the impact of vertical handover phases, and methods. It presents energy-centric state-of-the-art vertical handover approaches and their impact on energy efficiency. The paper also discusses the recommendations on possible energy gains at different stages of the vertical handover process