Albena D. Mihovska

The road to IMT-advanced communication systems: State-of-the- art and innovation areas addressed by the WINNER + project

Phases I and II of the WINNER project contributed to the development, integration, and assessment of new mobile network techniques from 2004 to 2007. Some of these techniques are now in the 3GPP LTE and IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) standards, while others are under consideration for LTE-Advanced and 802.16m. The WINNER+ project continues this forwardlooking work for IMT-advanced technologies and their evolution, with a particular focus on 3GPP LTE-advanced. This article provides an overview of the WINNER system concept and several of its key innovative components.

Network controlled mobility management with policy enforcement towards IMT-A

This paper introduces a framework of mobility management and call-handling based on policy enhancement towards the IMT-advanced systems. The function allocation and several selected mechanisms for the framework are described. The framework is based on the EU IST WINNER research project results and enables scalable service provisioning by setting the end user satisfaction and overall system performance as general goals. This paper aims to serve as a reference for the design of IMT-advanced systems.

Spectrum Aggregation with Multi-band User Allocation over Two Frequency Bands

This paper seeks to explore the integration of spectrum and network resource management functionalities to the benefit of achieving higher performance and capacity gains in an IMT-A scenario. In particular, we investigate the allocation of users over two frequency bands (i.e., 2 GHz and 5 GHz ones) for a single operator scenario. The same type of RAT is considered for both frequency bands. It is assumed that the operator considered in this work has gained access to the frequency pool with a certain portion of the available spectrum. The operator has access to a non-shared 2 GHz band and to part (or all) of the frequency pool band at 5 GHz. The performance gain is analyzed in terms of higher data throughput, reduced delay and lower blocking probability. The performance is heavily dependent on the channel quality for each user in the considered bands which, in turn, is a function of the path loss and the distance from the base station (BS). The operator will have relevant improvements when user terminals are heterogeneously distributed on the cell, with variable distances from the BS. A gain up to 400 kbps (22%) was obtained with the proposed suboptimal solution.

eWALL: An Intelligent Caring Home Environment Offering Personalized Context-Aware Applications Based on Advanced Sensing

Independent living of senior citizens is one of the main challenges linked to the ageing population. Senior citizens may suffer from a number of diseases, including the decline in cardiopulmonary conditions, weaker muscle functions and a declined neuromuscular control of the movements, which result in a higher risk of fall and a higher vulnerability for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. With respect to cognitive functions, senior citizens may suffer from a decline of memory function, less ability to orientate and a declined ability to cope with complex situations. This is by itself a big societal challenge with impact in multiple sectors. In this paper we present an innovative ICT solution, named eWALL, that aims to address these challenges by means of an advanced ICT infrastructure and home sensing environment; thus differentiating from existing eHealth and eCare solutions. The system of eWALL will extend the state-of-the-art of Assistive Platforms and will significantly increase the independent living of seniors.

eWall for Active Long Living: Assistive ICT Services for Chronically Ill and Elderly Citizens

Independent living of senior citizens is one of the main challenges linked to the ageing population, due to the impact on: (1) the life of the elderly people, (2) the national health systems, (3) the insurance companies, (4) the relatives and (5) the care-givers. Senior citizens may suffer from a number of diseases, including the decline in cardiopulmonary conditions, weaker muscle functions and a declined neuromuscular control of the movements, which result in a higher risk of fall and a higher vulnerability for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. With respect to cognitive functions, senior citizens may suffer from a decline of memory function, less ability to orientate and a declined ability to cope with complex situations. This paper describes work in progress and proposes a novel architecture design for eHealth services in support of independent living and compensating for prevailing age- or disease-related physical and cognitive impairments for a significant prolongation of the primary end-users functional capacity, a delay in institutionalization, increased autonomy and, prolonged participation in the society.

Visible Light Communications (VLC) for Ambient Assisted Living

With the advent of high efficacy light emitting diode directional lamps as a key component in focal lighting, new possibilities emerge for re-designing the smart home scenario. A smart home scenario is characterized by enabled intelligent interworking of various wireless and wired technologies to provide inhabitants with ease of use of appliances, while creating a personalized and safe ambience space. More and more high and low data rate circulates within the indoor ambient space (e.g., home, hospitals, offices). Although, unlicensed technologies, such as wireless local area networks can take upon part of the indoor traffic, the ever increasing demand for such data, and users, calls for either use of licensed or novel unlicensed wireless communication technologies as part of the smart home enablers. This paper focuses on the potentials of visible light communications (VLCs), jointly with radio and fiber communications, to support very dense low and high data rate connectivity, while enabling deployment of secure-sensitive indoor applications, including indoor tracking and localization. The paper proposes a scenario for integrating VLC into the smart home scenario and a conceptual supporting architecture for its deployment. Further, the technical challenges and possible roadmap for the actual deployment are analyzed for the particular case of an eHealth scenario where the utilization of VLC technology is the enabler of the cost-efficient rollout of the required infrastructure and thus the game-changer in a multi-billion eHealth niche that is seeking for cost affordable solutions.

Multi-operator resource sharing scenario in the context of IMT-Advanced systems

This paper investigates and proposes a framework for the efficient integration of functionalities for dynamic spectrum use (e.g., spectrum aggregation) and cooperative radio resource management (RRM) in the scope of IMT-Advanced (IMT-A) candidate systems. The envisaged technical solution is based on a joint centralized and distributed approach for both intra-and inter-operator scenarios. Spectrum assignment decisions benefit from a distributed approach that can be realized by the pooling of resources at higher layers together. The paper investigates the possible interworking between the two techniques for the benefits of achieving higher performance and capacity gains. Based on the proposed framework, operators will be able to demand portions of the spectrum for a certain time period and coordinate this action with the actual network loads. The framework is described in terms of functionalities, physical entities, and mutual interactions. The proposed integrated framework can reduce the CAPEX and OPEX during the deployment of IMT-A systems.

Requirements and Algorithms for Cooperation of Heterogeneous Radio Access Networks

This paper defines the requirements for cooperation of heterogeneous radio access networks (RANs) and proposes a novel radio resource management (RRM) framework for support of mobility and quality of service (QoS) in a heterogeneous communication environment comprising IMT-Advanced and legacy systems. The reference IMT-Advanced system is the one developed within the IST project WINNER (IST-2003-507581 Project Wireless Initiative New Radio, http://www.ist-winner.org). The RRM mechanisms are evolved from traditional ones to comply with the requirements imposed by a simplified new (RAN) architecture as proposed for IMT-Advanced systems. The RRM mechanisms are evaluated for the scenario of intra-RAN and inter-RAN user mobility. The RRM framework incorporates as novelty improved triggering mechanisms, a network-controlled mobility management scheme with policy enforcement on different levels in the RAN architecture, and a distributed handover and admission control mechanism for fast decision polling at different levels of the RAN. The RRM framework is further enhanced with computational intelligence based on fuzzy logic algorithms to enhance the process of handover. The RRM framework has been evaluated in terms of reduced user blocking probabilities.

Implementation of Fog computing for reliable E-health applications

This paper addresses the current technical challenge of an impedance mismatch between the requirements of smart connected object applications within the sensing environment and the characteristics of todays cloud infrastructure. We investigate the possibility to offload cloud tasks, such as storage and data signal processing to the edge of the network, thus decreasing the latency associated with performing those tasks within the cloud. The research scenario is an e-Health laboratory implementation where the real-time processing is performed by the home PC, while the extracted metadata is sent to the cloud for further processing.

Adaptive Security Architecture based on EC-MQV Algorithm in Personal Network (PN)

Personal networks (PNs) have been focused on in order to support the users business and private activities without jeopardizing privacy and security of the users and their data. In such a network, it is necessary to produce a proper key agreement method according to the feature of the network. One of the features of the network is that the personal devices have deferent capabilities such as computational ability, memory size, transmission power, processing speed and implementation cost. Therefore an adaptive security mechanism should be contrived for such a network of various device combinations based on users location and devices capability. The paper proposes new adaptive security architecture with three levels of asymmetric key agreement scheme by using context-aware security manager (CASM) based on elliptic curve cryptosystem (EC-MQV).