When Cost-Efficient Technologies Meet Politics: A Case Study of Radical Wireless Network Implementation

Cost efficiency has been a dominant perspective in the traditional IT literature. However, in complex technology and business environment, the widely recognized cost efficient assumption of information technology has been increasingly challenged. Drawing from a case study of wireless network implementation situated in a politically sensitive workplace, this paper provided practice insights for IT managers in today’s networked economy. More specifically, stories experienced in the case study illustrated that despite well-calculated cost efficiency of wireless network infrastructure, the radical implementation process in the case organization encountered enormous challenges and opposition due to the fact that administrators failed to consider various stakeholders’ positions and interests. Eventually, the implementation objectives and outcome were considerably undermined. Implications from this empirical case research reemphasized the significance of understanding political forces situated in any business environment where different stakeholders hold conflicting interests. Lessons learned from the case story further encouraged IT managers and policy makers to better strategize emerging information technology in general and wireless networks in particular as the whole global society and business environment are increasingly facing an emerging wireless world

The Embedding Capacity of Information Flows Under Renewal Traffic

Given two independent point processes and a certain rule for matching points between them, what is the fraction of matched points over infinitely long streams? In many application contexts, e.g., secure networking, a meaningful matching rule is that of a maximum causal delay, and the problem is related to embedding a flow of packets in cover traffic such that no traffic analysis can detect it. We study the best undetectable embedding policy and the corresponding maximum flow rate ---that we call the embedding capacity--- under the assumption that the cover traffic can be modeled as arbitrary renewal processes. We find that computing the embedding capacity requires the inversion of very structured linear systems that, for a broad range of renewal models encountered in practice, admits a fully analytical expression in terms of the renewal function of the processes. Our main theoretical contribution is a simple closed form of such relationship. This result enables us to explore properties of the embedding capacity, obtaining closed-form solutions for selected distribution families and a suite of sufficient conditions on the capacity ordering. We evaluate our solution on real network traces, which shows a noticeable match for tight delay constraints. A gap between the predicted and the actual embedding capacities appears for looser constraints, and further investigation reveals that it is caused by inaccuracy of the renewal traffic model rather than of the solution itself.Comment: Sumbitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory on March 10, 201

The Distribution of Minimum of Ratios of Two Random Variables and Its Application in Analysis of Multi-hop Systems

The distributions of random variables are of interest in many areas of science. In this paper, ascertaining on the importance of multi-hop transmission in contemporary wireless communications systems operating over fading channels in the presence of cochannel interference, the probability density functions (PDFs) of minimum of arbitrary number of ratios of Rayleigh, Rician, Nakagami-m, Weibull and α-µ random variables are derived. These expressions can be used to study the outage probability as an important multi-hop system performance measure. Various numerical results complement the proposed mathematical analysis

A random walk model of wave propagation

This paper shows that a reasonably accurate description of propagation loss in small urban cells can be obtained with a simple stochastic model based on the theory of random walks, that accounts for only two parameters: the amount of clutter and the amount of absorption in the environment. Despite the simplifications of the model, the derived analytical solution correctly describes the smooth transition of power attenuation from an inverse square law with the distance to the transmitter, to an exponential attenuation as this distance is increased - as it is observed in practice. Our analysis suggests using a simple exponential path loss formula as an alternative to the empirical formulas that are often used for prediction. Results are validated by comparison with experimental data collected in a small urban cell

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future