World radiocommunication conference 12 : implications for the spectrum eco-system

Spectrum allocation is once more a key issue facing the global telecommunications industry. Largely overlooked in current debates, however, is the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC). Decisions taken by WRC shape the future roadmap of the telecommunications industry, not least because it has the ability to shape the global spectrum allocation framework. In the debates of WRC-12 it is possible to identify three main issues: enhancement of the international spectrum regulatory framework, regulatory measures required to introduce Cognitive Radio Systems (CRS) technologies; and, additional spectrum allocation to mobile service. WRC-12 eventually decided not to change the current international radio regulations with regard to the first two issues and agreed to the third issue. The main implications of WRC-12 on the spectrum ecosystem are that most of actors are not in support of the concept of spectrum flexibility associated with trading and that the concept of spectrum open access is not under consideration. This is explained by the observation that spectrum trading and spectrum commons weaken state control over spectrum and challenge the main principles and norms of the international spectrum management regime. In addition, the mobile allocation issue has shown the lack of conformity with the main rules of the regime: regional spectrum allocation in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) three regions, and the resistance to the slow decision making procedures. In conclusion, while the rules and decision-making procedures of the international spectrum management regime were challenged in the WRC-12, the main principles and norms are still accepted by the majority of countries

Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study

Collaborating with Users in Proximity for Decentralized Mobile Recommender Systems

Typically, recommender systems from any domain, be it movies, music, restaurants, etc., are organized in a centralized fashion. The service provider holds all the data, biases in the recommender algorithms are not transparent to the user, and the service providers often create lock-in effects making it inconvenient for the user to switch providers. In this paper, we argue that the user's smartphone already holds a lot of the data that feeds into typical recommender systems for movies, music, or POIs. With the ubiquity of the smartphone and other users in proximity in public places or public transportation, data can be exchanged directly between users in a device-to-device manner. This way, each smartphone can build its own database and calculate its own recommendations. One of the benefits of such a system is that it is not restricted to recommendations for just one user - ad-hoc group recommendations are also possible. While the infrastructure for such a platform already exists - the smartphones already in the palms of the users - there are challenges both with respect to the mobile recommender system platform as well as to its recommender algorithms. In this paper, we present a mobile architecture for the described system - consisting of data collection, data exchange, and recommender system - and highlight its challenges and opportunities.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2019 IEEE 16th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (IEEE UIC 2019

MARINE: Man-in-the-middle attack resistant trust model IN connEcted vehicles

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET), a novel technology holds a paramount importance within the transportation domain due to its abilities to increase traffic efficiency and safety. Connected vehicles propagate sensitive information which must be shared with the neighbors in a secure environment. However, VANET may also include dishonest nodes such as Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attackers aiming to distribute and share malicious content with the vehicles, thus polluting the network with compromised information. In this regard, establishing trust among connected vehicles can increase security as every participating vehicle will generate and propagate authentic, accurate and trusted content within the network. In this paper, we propose a novel trust model, namely, Man-in-the-middle Attack Resistance trust model IN connEcted vehicles (MARINE), which identifies dishonest nodes performing MiTM attacks in an efficient way as well as revokes their credentials. Every node running MARINE system first establishes trust for the sender by performing multi-dimensional plausibility checks. Once the receiver verifies the trustworthiness of the sender, the received data is then evaluated both directly and indirectly. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance and accuracy of MARINE rigorously across three MiTM attacker models and the bench-marked trust model. Simulation results show that for a network containing 35% MiTM attackers, MARINE outperforms the state of the art trust model by 15%, 18%, and 17% improvements in precision, recall and F-score, respectively.N/A

Investigation of indoor localization with ambient FM radio stations

Localization plays an essential role in many ubiquitous computing applications. While the outdoor location-aware services based on GPS are becoming increasingly popular, their proliferation to indoor environments is limited due to the lack of widely available indoor localization systems. The de-facto standard for indoor positioning is based on Wi-Fi and while other localization alternatives exist, they either require expensive hardware or provide a low accuracy. This paper presents an investigation into localization system that leverages signals of broadcasting FM radio stations. The FM stations provide a worldwide coverage, while FM tuners are readily available in many mobile devices. The experimental results show that FM radio can be used for indoor localization, while providing longer battery life than Wi-Fi, making FM an alternative to consider for positioning.Comment: 10th IEEE Pervasive Computing and Communication conference, PerCom 2012, pp. 171 - 17

Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless

A converged broadcast and telecommunication service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption on three different terminal types. The motivations of service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication between them. The key features of tools required for creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular interest to those organizations currently conducting trials and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides them with an insight of the various additional functions required in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive services to a range of different mobile terminal types