Mobile Communications Industry Scenarios and Strategic Implications for Network Equipment Vendors

Mobile infrastructure markets have changed dramatically during the past years. The industry is experiencing a shift from traditional large-scale, hardware-driven system roll-outs to software and services -driven business models. Also, the telecommunications and internet worlds are colliding in both mobile infrastructure and services domains requiring established network equipment vendors and mobile operators to transform and adapt to the new business environment. This paper utilizes Schoemaker's scenario planning process to reveal critical uncertain elements shaping the future of the industry. Four possible scenarios representing different value systems between industry's key stakeholders are created. After this, five strategic options with differing risk and cost factors for established network equipment vendors are discussed in order to aid firm's strategic planning process. --

Aspects of Critical Communications in Disturbance Scenarios

Infrastructures are the foundations of modern societies. The most important ones are the so-called critical infrastructures: mobile networks and electricity networks. If these networks are damaged or otherwise unavailable, the functionality of the whole society is at risk and can result even in public safety hazards. Furthermore, people expect all the time ubiquitous access to internet through mobile networks as many services rely on these wireless networks. The dependence is growing all the time as the number of worldwide subscriptions has already exceeded the world population and the amount of internet of things (IoT) and other connected devices continues to increase exponentially.This thesis focuses on the critical communications aspects of mobile networks during disturbance scenarios. These are defined as situations where, e.g. there is a power blackout in the electricity network, which affects the functionality of the mobile network.The contributions of this thesis can be divided into three main themes. The first one is the actual functionality of mobile networks during disturbance scenarios. This includes finding out how the behavior of subscribers changes when there is an uncommon disturbance scenario in the mobile network and how to prolong the disturbance time functionality of the existing networks. The results show that subscribers utilize mobile networks more than usual already before the power blackout starts when they try to find out information about the status of an upcoming storm. Immediately after the disturbance scenario starts, the subscribers within the blackout area are more active as the statistics show 73 % increase in the number of new calls and 84 % in the amount of short message service (SMS) messages. The results show also that the majority of mobile network availability is lost after 3–4 hours from the start of the incident. In order to prolong this availability time, simulations are performed to find out how utilizing only a portion of the available base station (BS) sites affects the service coverage. The results show that around 20 % of BS sites would be enough to cover 75 % of the original service coverage. Therefore, the operational time of the so-called mobile network backup coverage could be increased several times given that core network (CN) and backhaul network are also operational.The second main theme in this thesis presents a new developed situation awareness system (SAS) that combines the outage information of both mobile and electricity networks. This is an important tool for monitoring the networks and performing disaster and disturbance management. The user interface of the developed SAS is a map view showing the outage information, i.e. the faults, in both networks. It utilizes operational data from both networks such as the coverage outage areas of the mobile network and the outages of transformers in the electricity network in near real-time. The developed SAS helps to prioritize maintenance and repair work to the most critical areas as well as help to form a better overall situation awareness that fire and rescue services and authorities could utilize for improving public safety actions.The last main theme in the thesis considers innovative solutions in order to find out methods to improve the performance, i.e., to mitigate the outage of mobile networks in disturbance scenarios. The three different approaches presented are the indirect guidance of subscribers, the concept of a temporary low altitude platform (LAP) network with the help of drones, and the concept of a macro sensor network (MSN). First, the energy and capacity aspects of mobile networks can be improved when the subscribers are indirectly guided to self-optimize their location in the serving cell area. This can result in serving more user equipment (UEs) within a cell or to decrease the amount of energy needed for transmissions. Next, the coverage aspects of a LAP system are studied in order to find out the suitability of forming a temporary emergency coverage with a wireless local area network (WLAN) equipped drones. The results show that this kind of approach could provide a suitable emergency coverage for a limited area with a reasonable number of drones. Finally, a framework for MSN is studied to investigate the possibility of bringing wireless sensor network (WSN) functionalities into mobile networks. The results show that the concept of MSN could remarkably improve the resilience of mobile networks in situations where the backhaul connection is broken. However, implementing and further developing this kind of functionality will require changes in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications and self-organizing network (SON) features within the network.Overall, this thesis provides insight on how to develop the current and future mobile networks toward more resilient infrastructures. It highlights the importance of critical communications as a fundamental part of modern societies. Thus, securing the functionality and performance of mobile networks in all situations is crucial. As a result, the contributions in this thesis can be utilized as a starting point in the future research to develop new functionalities for mobile networks. One of such approaches can be a safety mode, which would improve the mobile network resiliency during disasters and disturbance scenarios

Considering Vermont\u27s Future in a Changing Climate: The First Vermont Climate Assessment

The Vermont Climate Assessment (VCA) paints a vivid picture of a changing climate in Vermont and calls for immediate strategic planning to sustain the social, economic and environmental fabric of our state. The VCA is the first state-scale climate assessment in the country and speaks directly to the impacts of climate change as they pertain to our rural towns, cities and communities, including impacts on Vermont tourism and recreation, agriculture, natural resources and energy

The Benefits to People of Expanding Marine Protected Areas

This study focuses on how the economic value of marine ecosystem services to people and communities is expected to change with the expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs). It is recognised, however, that instrumental economic value derived from ecosystem services is only one component of the overall value of the marine environment and that the intrinsic value of nature also provides an argument for the conservation of the marine habitats and biodiversity

Heterogeneous integration of optical wireless communications within next generation networks

Unprecedented traffic growth is expected in future wireless networks and new technologies will be needed to satisfy demand. Optical wireless (OW) communication offers vast unused spectrum and high area spectral efficiency. In this work, optical cells are envisioned as supplementary access points within heterogeneous RF/OW networks. These networks opportunistically offload traffic to optical cells while utilizing the RF cell for highly mobile devices and devices that lack a reliable OW connection. Visible light communication (VLC) is considered as a potential OW technology due to the increasing adoption of solid state lighting for indoor illumination. Results of this work focus on a full system view of RF/OW HetNets with three primary areas of analysis. First, the need for network densication beyond current RF small cell implementations is evaluated. A media independent model is developed and results are presented that provide motivation for the adoption of hyper dense small cells as complementary components within multi-tier networks. Next, the relationships between RF and OW constraints and link characterization parameters are evaluated in order to define methods for fair comparison when user-centric channel selection criteria are used. RF and OW noise and interference characterization techniques are compared and common OW characterization models are demonstrated to show errors in excess of 100x when dominant interferers are present. Finally, dynamic characteristics of hyper dense OW networks are investigated in order to optimize traffic distribution from a network-centric perspective. A Kalman Filter model is presented to predict device motion for improved channel selection and a novel OW range expansion technique is presented that dynamically alters coverage regions of OW cells by 50%. In addition to analytical results, the dissertation describes two tools that have been created for evaluation of RF/OW HetNets. A communication and lighting simulation toolkit has been developed for modeling and evaluation of environments with VLC-enabled luminaires. The toolkit enhances an iterative site based impulse response simulator model to utilize GPU acceleration and achieves 10x speedup over the previous model. A software defined testbed for OW has also been proposed and applied. The testbed implements a VLC link and a heterogeneous RF/VLC connection that demonstrates the RF/OW HetNet concept as proof of concept

Atomicity and non-anonymity in population-like games for the energy efficiency of hybrid-power HetNets

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper, the user–base station (BS) association problem is addressed to reduce grid consumption in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) powered by hybrid energy sources (grid and renewable energy). The paper proposes a novel distributed control scheme inspired by population games and designed considering both atomicity and non-anonymity – i.e., describing the individual decisions of each agent. The controller performance is considered from an energy–efficiency perspective, which requires the guarantee of appropriate qualityof-service (QoS) levels according to renewable energy availability. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is compared with other heuristic and optimal alternatives in two simulation scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed approach inspired by population games reduces grid consumption by 12% when compared to the traditional best-signal-level association policy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Atomicity and non-anonymity in population-like games for the energy efficiency of hybrid-power HetNets

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper, the user–base station (BS) association problem is addressed to reduce grid consumption in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) powered by hybrid energy sources (grid and renewable energy). The paper proposes a novel distributed control scheme inspired by population games and designed considering both atomicity and non-anonymity – i.e., describing the individual decisions of each agent. The controller performance is considered from an energy–efficiency perspective, which requires the guarantee of appropriate qualityof-service (QoS) levels according to renewable energy availability. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is compared with other heuristic and optimal alternatives in two simulation scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed approach inspired by population games reduces grid consumption by 12% when compared to the traditional best-signal-level association policy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The ecomics of ecosystems and biodiversity: scoping the scale

The G8 decided in March 2007 to initiate a “Review on the economics of biodiversity loss”, in the so called Potsdam Initiative: 'In a global study we will initiate the process of analysing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation. The study is being supported by the European Commission (together with the European Environmental Agency and in cooperation with the German Government. “The objective of the current study is to provide a coherent overview of existing scientific knowledge upon which to base the economics of the Review, and to propose a coherent global programme of scientific work, both for Phase 2 (consolidation) and to enable more robust future iterations of the Review beyond 2010.