Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation

Management system requirements for wireless systems beyond 3G

This paper presents a comprehensive description of various management system requirements for systems beyond 3G, which have been identified as a result of the Software Based Systems activities within the Mobile VCE Core 2 program. Specific requirements for systems beyond 3G are discussed and potential technologies to address them proposed. The analysis has been carried out from network, service and security viewpoints

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Enhancing satellite & terrestrial networks integration through NFV/SDN technologies

NFV and SDN technologies can become key facilitators for the combination of terrestrial and satellite networks. Enabling NFV into the SatCom domain will provide operators with appropriate tools and interfaces in order to establish end-to-end fully operable virtualized satellite networks to be offered to third-party operators/service providers. Enabling SDNbased, federated resource management paves way for a unified control plane that would allow operators to efficiently manage and optimize the operation of the hybrid network. The proposed solution is expected to bring improved coverage, optimized communication resources use and better network resilience, along with improved innovation capacity and business agility for deploying communications services over combined networks.Postprint (author's final draft