Telecom regulation in the EU facing change of tack: Competition requires a clear policy line

The introduction of sector-specific regulation in the EU has fostered competition and innovation in the telecommunications industry. However, the liberalisation process still has a long way to go. The debate on the new scenario facing European telecoms regulators shows that as far as the institutional (centralised or decentralised) and time-related (ex-post or ex-ante) focus is concerned, a clear policy line is required. Politically motivated delays and ensuing uncertainties in the market must be avoided in order to boost innovation and achieve sustainable competition.regulation, telecommunications, EU, fixed line telephony

Automatic map-based FTTx access network design

Several mature and standardized optical access network technologies are available for network operators providing broadband services, being now in deployment phase; therefore cost estimation, business analysis, efficient deployment strategies, network and topology design issues for FTTx access networks play an increasingly important role regarding profitability and market success. In a competitive environment, techno-economic evaluation supports the optimal choice among available technologies. Even the tradeoff between future proof technical superiority and short term investment minimization requires a farseeing decision. In our point of view, cost estimation and techno-economic evaluation is strongly related to strategic network design: among others the uneven population density, irregular street system or infrastructure have significant impact on the network topology, thus the deployment costs as well. In order to deal with these aspects, a high-level, strategic network design is necessary that adapts to geospatial characteristics of the services area, providing accurate and detailed network information for the techno-economic evaluation [1]. We have developed a topology designer methodology that supprts the above requirements, providing (near) optimal topology of the fully or partially optical access network, based on the geospatial information about the service area: digital maps, existing infrastructure and subscriber database. Automatic topology design for large-scale service areas, with 10.000s of subsribers is a highly complex mathematical problem. The tough algorithms for a near optimal, yet efficient solution. The developed algorithms were evaluated regarding their speed and accuracy. Based on topology design results, a detailed and flexible techno-economic comparison is carried out, since the framework handles various broadband access network technologies, as presented in a case study. --Topology design,Strategic Design,Network planning,GIS,Map,Techno-economic,Cost estimation

Real-time dynamic spectrum management for multi-user multi-carrier communication systems

Dynamic spectrum management is recognized as a key technique to tackle interference in multi-user multi-carrier communication systems and networks. However existing dynamic spectrum management algorithms may not be suitable when the available computation time and compute power are limited, i.e., when a very fast responsiveness is required. In this paper, we present a new paradigm, theory and algorithm for real-time dynamic spectrum management (RT-DSM) under tight real-time constraints. Specifically, a RT-DSM algorithm can be stopped at any point in time while guaranteeing a feasible and improved solution. This is enabled by the introduction of a novel difference-of-variables (DoV) transformation and problem reformulation, for which a primal coordinate ascent approach is proposed with exact line search via a logarithmicly scaled grid search. The concrete proposed algorithm is referred to as iterative power difference balancing (IPDB). Simulations for different realistic wireline and wireless interference limited systems demonstrate its good performance, low complexity and wide applicability under different configurations.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publicatio