Mahbubul Alam

Quality of service among IP-based heterogeneous networks

The third generation communication system known as International Mobile Telecommunication-2000/Universal Mobile Telecommunication System will support a wide range of information services. Services may include voice, data, video and multimedia communication operating at bit rates up to 2 Mb/s over the air interface. They are also expected to be Internet Protocol (IP) based. The combination of new and more bandwidth demanding services and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements places increased demand on the available radio spectrum resources. Additional radio capacity will be needed in order to support IP traffic, especially in hot-spot areas. In this article, QoS architectures and techniques are examined for supporting scalable end-to-end QoS over IP-based heterogeneous networks.

Convergence Transforms Digital Home: Techno-Economic Impact

This paper discusses the past, the present, and the future of digital home and in particular, how convergence transforms home networking. It describes technology adoption-, consumer-, and behavioural-trends and discusses the business impact from consumer demand for “living in real-time” and from the convergence of applications, services, networks, and terminals. With the explosion of mobile and broadband usage with high Wi-Fi penetration at home and emerging trends such as online social networks, mashups, blogs, etc. will create unparalleled value to customers that will disrupt existing business models of fixed and mobile operators. Consumers expect access to applications and services instantaneously, irrespective of the location, place and all at real-time. Telco’s and business are beginning to understand how those behavioural trends, and convergence could have major impact on their service offering, marketing, products, price, go-to-market and how they can leverage these trends to attract and seek global talents. Proliferation of IP enabled device and applications will lead to the development of IP-based home networking in the areas of personal communications, network entertainment, communications and monitoring & management. Finally, a new law was established that will drive the future development of digital home, E = mc3, where E equates to Entertainment experience, m for media (content) and c3 for convergence of communications, computing technologies and consumer electronics. Success of home networking will heavily depend on industries ability to hide networks and systems complexities from end-users where simplicity of the user interface is the key.

The evolution of M2M into IoT

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has attracted considerable attention in research communities and has also started to gain momentum from a commercial perspective where operators are starting to offer services within the domains of fleet management, logistics, home automation, etc. At the same time, the more loosely defined, but broader domain of Internet of Things (IoT) is picking up as what many are seeing as an evolution of M2M. This paper investigates the fundamental differences of M2M and IoT by starting out with surveying some of the drivers and moving into an analysis of M2M of today from a technological and business perspective. The challenges in moving into IoT are investigated with emphasize on networking and computing.

Light-Weight AAA Infrastructure for Mobility Support Across Heterogeneous Networks

Security and privacy architecture for various access networks have often been considered on the upper service layers in the form of application and transport security and from lower layers in the form of security over wireless networks. Today there is no trust relationship between the stakeholders of different access network types for e.g. wireless mesh network, wireless PAN, wireless LAN, cellular network, satellite etc. and each have their own security mechanism. What is common for these access networks is the networking layer which is IP based. In order to provide seamless service across these heterogeneous access networks there must be a trust relationship among the stakeholders for authentication, authorization, accounting and billing of end user. However, what is still missing is a general solution which is both adaptable to the network types and conditions and also takes into account end system capabilities as well as enabling inter-domain AAA negotiation. This paper proposes a light-weight AAA infrastructure providing continuous, on-demand, end-to-end security in heterogeneous networks.