Regulatory Approaches to NGNs: An International Comparison

The emergence of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) raises profound challenges for regulators everywhere. Different regulatory authorities have approached these problems in strikingly different ways, depending in part on the overall regulatory milieu in which they operate, and in part on the nature of the NGN migration envisioned by major market players. Also, the NGN core network raises significantly different issues from those of the NGN access network. The migration to NGN raises many of the same issues that were already on the table as a result of the broader migration to IP-based services,notably in regard to the de-coupling of the service from the underlying network. To these concerns are added profound questions related to the nature of market power. Will NGNs enable new forms of competition? Will competitive bottlenecks remain, especially in the last mile? Will NGN enable new forms of bottlenecks to emerge, especially in the upper layers of the network, perhaps as a result of new IMS capabilities? Regulators in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Japan and the United States have been forced to deal with these issues due to relatively rapid migration to NGNs proposed by their respective incumbent telecoms operators. Many of the same issues are also visible in the recommendations that the European Commission finalised on 13 November 2007 as part of the ongoing review of the European regulatory framework for electronic communications. In this paper, we compare and contrast the many regulatory proceedings that have been produced by these regulatory authorities.Regulation; Next Generation Networks; access network; core network; all-IP; competition; market power; international comparison.

Regulatory Approaches to NGNs: An International Comparison

The emergence of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) raises profound challenges for regulators everywhere. Different regulatory authorities have approached these problems in strikingly different ways, depending in part on the overall regulatory milieu in which they operate, and in part on the nature of the NGN migration envisioned by major market players. Also, the NGN core network raises significantly different issues from those of the NGN access network. The migration to NGN raises many of the same issues that were already on the table as a result of the broader migration to IP-based services, notably in regard to the de-coupling of the service from the underlying network. To these concerns are added profound questions related to the nature of market power. Will NGNs enable new forms of competition? Will competitive bottlenecks remain, especially in the last mile? Will NGN enable new forms of bottlenecks to emerge, especially in the upper layers of the network, perhaps as a result of new IMS capabilities? Regulators in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Japan and the United States have been forced to deal with these issues due to relatively rapid migration to NGNs proposed by their respective incumbent telecoms operators. Many of the same issues are also visible in the recommendations that the European Commission finalised on 13 November 2007 as part of the ongoing review of the European regulatory framework for electronic communications. In this paper, we compare and contrast the many regulatory proceedings that have been produced by these regulatory authorities.Regulation; Next Generation Networks; access network; core network; all-IP; competition; market power; international comparison

Tarkan ja luotettavan ajan siirto kantaverkossa

This master’s thesis is about time distribution that supports substation applications needed for power transmission. The work was done for the Telecommunication department of Finland’s power transmission system operator Fingrid Oyj. This thesis answers to the following question: What is the need for accurate and synchronized time in power substations and how it will be delivered? Fingrid’s telecommunication network supports the power transmission grid and its operation. Telecommunication network can distribute time to power substations for the applications that need synchronized and accurate time. Current telecommunication equipment used in Fingrid is getting old and new techniques are planned to be implemented. When Fingrid is acquiring new communication equipment, they need to set requirements on the capability to distribute time. This thesis is an initial effort to investigate time distribution requirements for Fingrid’s needs. This thesis aids Fingrid Telecommunication department to define requirements for time distribution. For this thesis, I met with multiple Fingrid professionals, telecommunication device suppliers and time distribution researchers. This thesis answers to its research questions by means of a literature review and interviews.Tämä diplomityö käsittelee ajansiirron vaikutusta sähköasemasovellusten toimintaan. Työ tehtiin Suomen kantaverkkoyhtiö Fingrid Oyj:n tietoliikenneyksikölle. Fingridin tietoliikenneverkko on osa kantaverkkoa ja mahdollistaa sähköjärjestelmän toiminteita. Tietoliikenneverkon yksi palvelu on synkronoidun ajan siirtäminen sähköasemille. Nykyinen tietoliikennetekniikka on vanhenemassa ja uutta laitteistoa suunnitellaan hankittavaksi ja testattavaksi. Tämän diplomityön tarkoitus on selvittää mikä on järkevä tapa toteuttaa ajan siirto ja kuinka tarkkaa sen pitää olla. Työ auttaa tietoliikenneyksikköä hankinnan vaatimusmäärittelyssä ajansiirron osalta. Työtä varten on tavattu monia Fingridin asiantuntijoita, tietoliikennelaitetoimittajia sekä ajansiirron asiantuntijoita. Työ vastaa tutkimuskysymykseen kirjallisuuskatsauksen ja haastattelujen perusteella

Mobile Networks

The growth in the use of mobile networks has come mainly with the third generation systems and voice traffic. With the current third generation and the arrival of the 4G, the number of mobile users in the world will exceed the number of landlines users. Audio and video streaming have had a significant increase, parallel to the requirements of bandwidth and quality of service demanded by those applications. Mobile networks require that the applications and protocols that have worked successfully in fixed networks can be used with the same level of quality in mobile scenarios. Until the third generation of mobile networks, the need to ensure reliable handovers was still an important issue. On the eve of a new generation of access networks (4G) and increased connectivity between networks of different characteristics commonly called hybrid (satellite, ad-hoc, sensors, wired, WIMAX, LAN, etc.), it is necessary to transfer mechanisms of mobility to future generations of networks. In order to achieve this, it is essential to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of current protocols and the diverse topologies to suit the new mobility conditions

Multivariate statistical data analysis of cell-free protein synthesis toward monitoring and control

The optimization and control of cell free protein synthesis (CFPS) presents an ongoing challenge due to the complex synergies and nonlinearities that cannot be fully explained in first principle models. This article explores the use of multivariate statistical tools for analyzing data sets collected from the CFPS of Cereulide monoclonal antibodies. During the collection of these data sets, several of the process parameters were modified to investigate their effect on the end‐point product (yield). Through the application of principal component analysis and partial least squares (PLS), important correlations in the process could be identified. For example, yield had a positive correlation with pH and NH3 and a negative correlation with CO2 and dissolved oxygen. It was also found that PLS was able to provide a long‐term prediction of product yield. The presented work illustrates that multivariate statistical techniques provide important insights that can help support the operation and control of CFPS processes

Fog and Cloud Computing Assisted IoT Model Based Personal Emergency Monitoring and Diseases Prediction Services

Along with the rapid development of modern high-tech and the change of people's awareness of healthy life, the demand for personal healthcare services is gradually increasing. The rapid progress of information and communication technology and medical and bio technology not only improves personal healthcare services, but also brings the fact that the human being has entered the era of longevity. At present, there are many researches focused on various wearable sensing devices and implant devices and Internet of Things in order to capture personal daily life health information more conveniently and effectively, and significant results have been obtained, such as fog computing. To provide personal healthcare services, the fog and cloud computing is an effective solution for sharing health information. The health big data analysis model can provide personal health situation reports on a daily basis, and the gene sequencing can provide hereditary disease prediction. However, the injury mortality and emergency diseases since long ago caused death and great pain for the family. And there are no effective rescue methods to save precious lives and no methods to predict the disease morbidity likelihood. The purpose of this research is to capture personal daily health information based on sensors and monitoring emergency situations with the help of fog computing and mobile applications, and disease prediction based on cloud computing and big data analysis. Through the comparison of test results it was proved that the proposed emergency monitoring based on fog and cloud computing and the diseases prediction model based on big data analysis not only gain more of the rescue time than the traditional emergency treatment method, but they also accumulate lots of different personal healthcare related experience. The Taian 960 hospital of PLA and the Yanbian Hospital as IM testbed were joined to provide emergency monitoring tests, and to ensure the CVD and CVA morbidity likelihood medical big data analysis, the people around Taian city participated in personal health tests. Through the project, the five network layers architecture and integrated MAPE-K Model based EMDPS platform not only made the cooperation between hospitals feasible to deal with emergency situations, but also the Internet medicine for the disease prediction was built

Design of a control and management system for frequency-and time-synchronous SDN networks

Many of today's telecommunications systems rely on strict timing and synchronization requirements. This is the case of cellular telephony (3G, 4G/LTE), where base stations need accurate and stable frequency clocks in order to obtain their carrier radio frequencies, arbitrate the frequency- and time-shared access of terminals, and coordinate the handover of terminals between adjacent cells. The imminent deployment of 5G networks, with a much higher density of cells and speed, will further increase the need for synchronization. On the one hand, Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) is a well-known, cheap, scalable Ethernet data plane, with the addition of special messages that convey frequency synchronization information. On the other hand, Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is a widely used protocol to transport time information, and used to synchronize nodes in networks. On top of that, SDN is a new networking paradigm that provides an abstraction of the forwarding function, decoupling the data plane from the control plane. The control of the network is moved to the controller, an external centralized entity that manages the network configuration based on policies through a southbound interface, for example OpenFlow. SDN architecture opens the way to the virtualization of network functions, the global optimization of network operations, and reduces operational costs. Two solutions proposed moving SyncE and PTP to SDN networks: SyncE has been introduced in SDN with the SDN-enabled SyncE networks and PTP with the ReversePTP. SDN-enabled SyncE proposed extensions to OpenFlow 1.0 which enables the SDN network to control the circulation of ESMC PDU, the possibility of transmitting SyncE statistics and to build synchronization trees based on SyncE. ReversePTP proposed extensions to OpenFlow which enabled the SDN network to request the time to each node, so the SDN controllers know clock offsets between slave clocks (network elements) and itself (master clock). These extensions allow to coordinate the handover of terminals between adjacent cells in mobile networks and a kind of PTP. However, there is no solution in the literature which proposes an SDN+PTP+SyncE (i.e. a full synchronous) solution. This master thesis proposes multiple standard extensions of the OpenFlow protocol in order to deploy Fully-Synchronous SDN (FSS) networks. For that, SyncE and PTP are studied and implemented in the SDN architecture. The proposed extensions and modifications have been deployed and successfully tested in a real environment. Results showed a good performance on PTP time-stamping

Ping-pong reduction for handover process using adaptive hysteresis margin: a methodological approach

The technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE) developed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project is considered an improved standard in mobile communications when compared to previously attained network standards. LTE with prospects of decreased latency levels and support of downlink and uplink transmission at data rates exceeding 100Mbps and 50Mbps, an effective handover framework needs to be put in place to improve quality of service rendered to the network users and decrease wastage of network resources. This study examines several works carried out on a handover criteria (hysteresis margin) needed for designing an effective handover framework. This margin is based on the received signal strength between both target and serving eNodeBs, and its proper determination amongst other advantages mitigates the rate of unnecessary and repeated handover (ping-pong effect). The model presented in this research integrates the artificial neural network (ANN) mechanism into the determination of hysteresis margin in the LTE handover process which is to minimize handover delay and ping-pong taking into consideration the speed of the user equipment (UE)