Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges

Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Strategically Addressing the Latest Challenges of Workplace Mobility to Meet the Increasing Mobile Usage Demands

During this post-PC era, many organizations are embracing the concept of IT consumerization/ Bring-Your-Own Device (BYOD) in their workplace. BYOD is a strategy that enables employees to utilize their personally-owned mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, and netbooks, to connect to the corporate network and access enterprise data. It is estimated that employees will bring two to four Internet-capable devices to work for personal and professional activities. From increased employee satisfaction and productivity to lower IT equipment and operational expenditures, companies have recognized that mobile devices are reasonably essential to their own success. However, many organizations are facing significant challenges with the explosion of mobile devices being used today along with provisioning the appropriate supporting infrastructure due to the unprecedented demands on the wireless and network infrastructures. For example, there is not only a growth in the number of wirelessly connected devices but the amount of bandwidth being consumed on the enterprise networks as well which is furthermore driven by increased usage of video and enterprise applications. Managing mobility and storage along with securing corporate assets have become difficult tasks for IT professionals as many organizations underestimate the potential security and privacy risks of using wireless devices to access organizational resources and data. Therefore, to address the needs and requirements of a new mobile workforce, organizations must involve key members from the Information Technology (IT), Human Resources (HR) and various business units to evaluate the existing and emerging issues and risks posed by BYOD. Then a mobile strategy should be developed by taking into consideration the enterprise objectives to ensure it aligns with the overall organizational strategy. There are various solutions available to address the needs and demands of an organization, such as Distributed Intelligence Architecture, network optimization, monitoring tools, unified management and security platforms, and other security measures. By implementing a suitable mobile strategy, organizations can ensure their particular enterprise network and wireless architecture is designed for highly scalability, performance and reliability. They must also evaluate their existing policies and procedures to ensure appropriate security and privacy measures are in place to address the increasing mobile usage demands and potential liability risks. By taking these factors into consideration, our team has analyzed the current BYOD issues for Educational Testing Service (ETS), which is a non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey. Our findings have revealed a few major technical concerns relating to inadequate network and wireless infrastructure and the lack of a unified management and security platform. Thus, the team has recommended for ETS to implement Distributed Intelligence Architecture, network optimization and Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) to address and resolve their current issues and risks. In conclusion, companies are beginning to seize this transition in order to become competitive and productive in the workplace; however the unprecedented demands on the corporate network and risk to data security are critical aspects that need to be evaluated on an on-going basis. With this analysis, organizations can review, evaluate and implement the proposed solutions and best practices to address the most common BYOD-related issues that companies are facing these days. However, organizations should continually research the latest technologies that may be available and implement solutions that specifically meet their issues