Deploying SDN and NFV at the speed of innovation: toward a new bond between standards development organizations, industry fora and open-source software projects

Standards development organizations (SDOs) exist to assure the development of consensus-based, quality standards. These formal standards are needed in the telecommunications market to achieve functional interoperability. The standardization process takes years, and then a vendor still needs to implement the resulting standard in a product. This prevents service providers (SPs) who are willing to venture into new domains from doing so at a fast pace. With the development of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), opensource technology is emerging as a new option in the telecommunications market. In contrast to SDOs, open-source software (OSS) communities create a product that may implicitly define a de-facto standard based on market consensus. Therefore, SPs are drawn to OSS, but they face technical, procedural, legal, and cultural challenges due to their lack of experience with open software development. The question therefore arises, how the interaction between OSS communities, SDOs, and industry fora (IF) can be organized to tackle these challenges. This article examines the evolving roles of OSS communities, IF, and SDOs, and places them in an NFV/SDN context. It sketches the differences between these roles and provides guidelines on how the interaction between them can turn into a mutually beneficial relationship that balances the conflicting goals of timely development on the one hand and technical excellence, openness, and fairness on the other, to reach their common goal of creating flexible and efficient telecommunications networks

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems

From opt-in to obligation? : Examining the regulation of globally operating tech companies through alternative regulatory instruments from a material and territorial viewpoint

Modern society’s ever-increasing reliance on technology raises complex legal challenges. In the search for an efficient and effective regulatory response, more and more authorities – in particular the European Union – are relying on alternative regulatory instruments (ARIs) when engaging big tech companies. Materially, this is a natural fit: the tech industry is a complex and rapidly-evolving sector and – unlike the rigid classic legislative process – ARIs allow for meaningful ex ante anticipatory constructions and ex post enforcement due to their unique flexibility. However, from a territorial point of view several complications arise. Although the use of codes of conduct to regulate transnational private actors has a rich history, the way in which such codes are set out under articles 40 and 41 of the EU’s GDPR implies a ‘hardening’ of these soft law instruments that has repercussions for their relationship to the principles of territorial jurisdiction. This contribution serves as a first step for further research into the relationship between codes of conduct, the regulation of the tech industry and the territorial aspects related thereto

Planning strategically, designing architecturally : a framework for digital library services

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced

(De)convergence in TV: a comparative analysis of the development of Smart TV

Against the backdrop of media convergence, Smart TVs are developing rapidly in large parts of the world. Smart TV refers to the integration of broadband Internet and social media features into TV sets. From a media business perspective, the proliferation of Smart TV services may put pressure on the market structure of the TV landscape, and urge for new business models in order to capture the dynamics of media convergence. By means of a comparative analysis in four European markets (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), the development of Smart TV is sketched in terms of viewing patterns, business models and standardization. The conclusion is that national TV markets are evolving quite differently, so that service providers must adapt their marketing strategies to reflect local market conditions. Hence, the success of Smart TV ultimately depends on the local package of value-added services and the amount of strategic partnerships with content owners, TV broadcasters and pay-TV operators

Critical Management Issues for Implementing RFID in Supply Chain Management

The benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the supply chain are fairly compelling. It has the potential to revolutionise the efficiency, accuracy and security of the supply chain with significant impact on overall profitability. A number of companies are actively involved in testing and adopting this technology. It is estimated that the market for RFID products and services will increase significantly in the next few years. Despite this trend, there are major impediments to RFID adoption in supply chain. While RFID systems have been around for several decades, the technology for supply chain management is still emerging. We describe many of the challenges, setbacks and barriers facing RFID implementations in supply chains, discuss the critical issues for management and offer some suggestions. In the process, we take an in-depth look at cost, technology, standards, privacy and security and business process reengineering related issues surrounding RFID technology in supply chains

Emergent Capabilities for Collaborative Teams in the Evolving Web Environment

This paper reports on our investigation of the latest advances for the Social Web, Web 2.0 and the Linked Data Web. These advances are discussed in terms of the latest capabilities that are available (or being made available) on the Web at the time of writing this paper. Such capabilities can be of significant benefit to teams, especially those comprised of multinational, geographically-dispersed team members. The specific context of coalition members in a rapidly formed diverse military context such as disaster relief or humanitarian aid is considered, where close working between non-government organisations and non-military teams will help to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible. The heterogeneity one finds in such teams, coupled with a lack of dedicated private network infrastructure, poses a number of challenges for collaboration, and the current paper represents an attempt to assess whether nascent Web-based capabilities can support such teams in terms of both their collaborative activities and their access to (and sharing of) information resources

The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 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.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Thought for Food: the impact of ICT on agribusiness

This report outlines the impact of ICT on the food economy. On the basis of a literature review from four disciplines - knowledge management, management information systems, operations research and logistics, and economics - the demand for new ICT applications, the supply of new applications and the match between demand and supply are identified. Subsequently the impact of new ICT applications on the food economy is discussed. The report relates the development of new technologies to innovation and adoption processes and economic growth, and to concepts of open innovations and living lab