Ahmed Bouabdallah

Interpersonal context-aware communication services

Context awareness is a very large research domain, encompassing many issues ranging from physical measurement of a given situation to the question of social acceptance. It appears as one of the most promising technologies to evolve current communication services into fluid, flexible, automagic, intuitive communication means. We review in this article the various applications of context awareness to convergent interpersonal communication services, making clear the evolutionary potential introduced by these techniques, from the classical digital phone network to truly smart services, many of which remain to be invented.

Improving Radio Resource Usage with Suitable Policy and Charging Control in LTE

The LTE (Long-Term Evolution) is a high-data rate open multimedia mobile system. In this paper, we consider the LTE QoS model framework and try to optimize the operator policy with regard to the radio use efficiency. Our objective is to propose a link between the PCRF (Policy Charging and Rules Function) decisions and the radio situation as an evolution for the LTE standard. We define a central database for the access network radio information that can be used for the operator policy choices. In this paper, we concentrate on the voice service, as a first step. Simple computations are provided. We show that our contribution can lead to a greater user average quality without loss of capacity. Other important openings are highlighted, promising interesting radio efficiency gains.

Generalizing Contextual Situations

This paper presents an algorithm that generalizes big sets of contextual situations. Apart from giving details on its mechanisms and implementation, we discuss its employment in a context experience sharing system, KRAMER, and simulate its performance in function of several parameters modelling the expected real data experiment.

Approaches for Offering QoS and Specialized Traffic Treatment for WebRTC

Real-time communications are much more than only traditional voice services. They have become interactive, transversal and are expected to be integrated as a feature of other applications. More and more communications services are offered by web companies that have been taking advantage of Internet flat rate charges and mostly use best-effort capabilities. Simultaneously, many efforts are currently devoted to improve the quality of experience of clients using communication services. The paper analyses current implementations of managed VoIP and emerging WebRTC technology in order to assess the possibility of offering specialized media flow treatments to real-time web communications. It proposes two research approaches: “in-network” and “over-the-network” and several elements that could contribute to an overall solution allowing web communication services to benefit from specialized network services.

On the benefits of a network-centric implementation for context-aware telecom services

Advanced context-aware telecom services require evaluating rules encompassing local or remote, raw or abstract context situations. The meteoric rise of smartphones raises the question of potential deployment of terminal-based context-aware services versus a network-centric one. In this paper we compare these two approaches through the analysis of typical context-aware services.

Building a Confident Advanced Email System Using a New Correspondence Model

Due to its ease of use combined with its efficiency, traditional email service constitutes one of the main success story brought by the Internet. Its popularity hides however significant gaps. Professional email systems usually remedy such deficiencies by compiling a lot of sophisticated features in a single monolithic policy which should ideally take into account security requirements together with various other specific needs. The main drawback of these approaches lies in their inherent rigidity. They indeed grant no place for the concepts of usage and context which are fundamental for any modern communication service. The usage is determined by a users intention of communication: private, professional, administrative, official, military. Context is clearly orthogonal to usage because a same usage may require different features depending of the context. We propose to define a correspondence model which for a given usage and context allows to dynamically derive a correspondence type encapsulating the exact set of required features. With this model, it becomes possible to define an advanced email system which may dynamically cope with multiple policies instead of a single monolithic one. By allowing a user to select the exact policy matching her needs, we argue that our approach reduces her risk-taking, providing in this way a confident advanced email system.

An Orchestrator-Based SDN Framework with Its Northbound Interface

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is deemed to empower next generation network and cloud services in several aspects. The authors argue that its high flexibility can be exploited not only in retrieving services efficiently but also in yielding new ones by introducing programming capabilities on its top. This however requires to structure its northbound interface (NBI) with an abstract application programming interface (API), the definition of which is actually one of the SDN challenges.

A Model to Compare and Manipulate Situations Represented as Semantically Labeled Graphs

In our previous work we have introduced a novel social media that performs collaborative filtering on situations. This enhances user situation awareness with a collaborative effort to learn about importance of situations. In this paper we focus on defining a conceptual graph-based model used to represent situations in our system, so that it would (1) be consistent with existing formal definitions of situation, and (2) enable logical manipulations on situations, namely their detection and semantic generalization, which we employ in the system. In particular, we show how the latter can be accomplished thanks to situation lattices, which we adapt for the model.

A New LTE/EPC Control-Plane Based Transmission Procedure to Cope with Short Data Push Services

The architecture and the protocols of LTE/EPC were designed to deliver high transmission rates with QoS requirements. In order to be able to guarantee different levels of QoS, each transmission is based on a bearer, which needs to be set up within the network. It then requires to store contexts in the various entities of the network and to set up several tunnels or connections both in the user and the control planes. This approach is, however, inadequate when considering a class of value-added services obedient to a “Short Data push principle”. This category which contains, at least, very popular services like Short Message Service (SMS) and Twitter, or new ones like Machine-to-Machine communication services, represents on one hand a continuously growing part of the worldwide amount of data traffic exchanged and on the other hand is easily recognizable thanks to its specific traffic pattern. To allow LTE/EPC to conveniently cope with the sporadic nature of these services, we introduce a new procedure based on a set of simple messages to transport such isolated messages only in the control plane. We show that this procedure may generate additional signaling in some cases but is efficient as soon as the proportion of sporadic traffic is not negligible. We illustrate our approach in the case of the SMS which is emblematic of the targeted category of services. The proposed procedure is, however, generic and may be used for any type of sporadic traffic.

Synchronization Mechanisms for Live Video-Context Transmission Service

A promising feature brought along the progressive deployment of LTE concerns the increase of the uplink bandwidth. We focus in this paper on an innovative usage associated with this new capability and defined by the simultaneous transmission toward websites or distant spectators of live video caught through end user devices like smart phones, together with contextual data generated by the device. The contextual information may indeed be precious to the spectator for several reasons. On one side, this information cannot be deduced from the video images currently displayed. On the other side, being closely related to the live event currently displayed, context can be fruitfully exploited by the spectator to complete her understanding of what she is presently watching and to possibly interact with the filming person to influence the rest of the capture. The main property of this new feature can be expressed as a synchronization constraint between the video and the contextual data. Ensuring this property is challenging due to the presence of variable delays in the end-to-end path. In this paper, we analyze this problem and propose optimization solutions taking into account the characteristics of the devices used to catch and exploit the contextual data. We show by simulations their effectiveness as compared to the current techniques. Our algorithms enable to verify the synchronization and to properly use the endpoint resources.