Chitra Balakrishna

Enabling Technologies for Smart City Services and Applications

Smart mobile devices are fast becoming the epicentre of peoples lives. Most smart phones are currently embedded with powerful and programmable sensors such as GPS, gyroscope, microphone, camera, accelerometer etc. These sensor-enabled smart-phones would form an important element of the future networked-infrastructure. A new wave of services is bound to erupt from such connected infrastructure and smart devices that will influence all aspects of our social ecosystem. In the context of Smart Cities, this position paper and the associated invited talk presents the Mobile Technology perspective of the Smart-city architecture by presenting a conceptualized framework and highlights the open and emerging research challenges in this landscape.

Towards a User-Centric and Quality-Aware Multimedia Service Delivery Implementation on IP Multimedia Subsystem

IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) originating from the 3GPP is pivotal on the road to next generation all-IP networks. Multimedia applications are potential drivers for the adoption of next generation IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and could be a decisive factor in its deployment. They are expected to generate revenue to the operators and justify their investment in IMS. And, for these multimedia services to be widely accepted by the end users, guaranteed and adaptable quality of service provision across heterogeneous access networks and heterogeneous device types is mandatory. In this paper, a generic, adaptive, controlled service delivery framework implementation for multimedia applications on IMS architecture is proposed. The framework is designed to be user-centric, adaptable to terminal mobility and session mobility with minimum session disruption enabling a better end-to-end QoS. It is at the session-level, completely user-driven and does not account for the network-level QoS. It employs the Session initiation protocol (SIP), which is the signaling protocol for the 3GPP specified IMS. The purpose behind designing the framework is to evaluate the provisioning of quality-adaptive multimedia services on IMS network and analyze the performance with respect to delay induced by quality adaptation procedures during session and terminal mobility which might contribute towards the end-to- end quality of service delivered to the users.

GenXfone - Design and Implementation of Next-Generation Ubiquitous SIP Client

The convergence of the fixed and mobile world allows for interoperability of services as well as innovative blend of services across both the domains. For instance, a user may want to perform session mobility from his mobile to his PC or from his fixed phone to a PDA. Most clients available in the market, lack features like session mobility, location aware services and automatic codec updates, etc. Integrating advanced features into a single user agent can provide a plethora of innovative communication services. In this paper we present a study of the existing SIP clients and propose a new SIP-based client that supports not only the standard features but also many new features.

Cloud Security Risk Management: A Critical Review

Cloud computing has created a remarkable paradigm shift in the IT industry and brought several advantages such as on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. These advantages enabled cloud to have significant impact on different sectors of smart cites. However, cloud adoption has increased the sophistication of the ever changing security risks which frustrate enterprises on expanding their on-premises infrastructure towards cloud horizons. These risks have the potential of being a major concern for smart cities due to the increasing impact of cloud on them. Managing these security risks requires adopting effective risk management method which involve both the cloud service provider and the customer. The risk management frameworks currently applied to manage enterprise IT risks do not readily fit the cloud environment and the dynamic nature of clouds, which are characterized by on demand self-service and rapid elasticity. Therefore, researchers have proposed different cloud security risk management methods and frameworks. This paper critically reviews these risk management methods and frameworks. In addition, it conducts critical analysis on two of them using qualitative content analysis technique, and evaluates their effectiveness for assessing and mitigating cloud security risks.

IMS experience centre A real-life test network for IMS services

3GPP standardized IP multimedia subsystem is yet to witness large-scale commercial deployment. This is a surprising fact, considering the advantages offered by the IMS technology, such as open standards architecture, rapid service deployment features, reduction in operational expenses amongst the others. In order to identify the IMS deployment hurdles as well as to measure the realistic performance of the IMS technology and the existing IMS services, there is a need for a real-life test network. On one hand, network testing grounds are traditionally restricted to laboratories where the setup is highly controlled and isolated from real-life scenarios, on the other hand testing on commercial networks is typically forbidden at the risk of disrupting the live services. Thus, majority of the existing communication test-beds lack the scale, flexibility and the infrastructure to represent and emulate a true next-generation networking environment. This paper presents a test network that is connected to a live mobile operator network that is designed to emulate a “real-life” next-generation operator network that not only provisions nextgeneration IMS-based multimedia services, but also presents a service creation environment enabling new and innovative services. This test network is termed as the “IMS Experience Centre” reflecting the fact that it enables real-life experience of IMS technology and services. This is achieved by integrating the currently existing heterogeneous access technologies with a 3GPP standards based IMS core network and an adequate service creation layer with service enablers and highly abstracted application development environments.

Consumer Health Care: Current Trends in Consumer Health Monitoring

The term health care has a very wide scope that ranges from lifestyle and wellness to care for acute conditions. With the availability of digital accessories for monitoring basic biological functions, the potential for obtaining detailed data on the lifestyle, habits, and behavior of an individual exists. Such data can enable the diagnosis of the causes for a condition with higher accuracy. Recently, a large number of devices have become available on the market that can monitor various aspects of lifestyle and biological functions. Such data provide feedback to an individual for compliance with healthy guidelines as well as contributing information to the health-care provider for use in the diagnosis of an ailment. In this article, we identify the various aspects of care that can benefit from consumer-grade health-monitoring devices and present the overall landscape in the context of self-care. We qualify the term consumer health care, assigning the context to it and identifying the services available in that context.

Is Rural Botswana Stuck to the "Chalkboard Only" Era while Others Make Strides in Mobile Learning?

This paper discusses causes of the sluggish growth rates of mobile learning in a developing country (Botswana), despite the mobile phone revolution and proposes future directions in application of mobile technology to enhance education in emerging economies.

A reality check on sip-based streaming applications on the next generation mobile test network

The telecom and the Internet world is converging towards all-IP network architecture and the operators are keen to provide innovative multimedia services coupled with advanced features such as seamless mobility across heterogeneous access networks to the users. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) provides the required application-level abstraction to enable advanced mobility and session management for multimedia services across heterogeneous access networks. However, SIP-based handoff procedures suffer from delay and packet losses that hamper the user experience for delay-sensitive multimedia applications. In this paper we have attempted to perform a reality-check on the performance of such SIP-based multimedia applications across the existing heterogeneous access network technologies by measuring delay, mean opinion score (MOS) and throughputs experienced, thus evaluating the user-experience. The paper presents the performance results obtained on a test-setup connected to a live operator network. Hence the results obtained are expected to be of value to the service providers to optimize their server settings to deliver optimum quality of service, to network providers to tune their access networks and to application developers to decide when to perform the handoff from one access network to the other to maintain the quality of experience for the user. The paper also proposes recommendation for minimizing the delays and optimizing the performance of SIP-based streaming applications.