Mosiuoa Tsietsi

Research Testbed Networks: Practical Tools for Service Delivery?

The Telkom Centre of Excellence (CoE) at Rhodes University, housed in the Computer Science department was opened in 1997. The CoEs focus on Distributed multimedia service platforms soon showed that the technology being researched could be applied in the disadvantaged peri‐urban communities. The CoE has thus concentrated its research on building a testbed network that delivers real services to real users. In 2007, the testbed was extended to include a marginalised rural area in the Siyakhula Living Lab. The greatest factor in the sustainability of the CoE testbed network has been maintaining usefulness to all the stakeholders over the last 12 years. Industrial funding, University outreach goals and research goals could all be harmonised, while sustaining the delivery of high quality informatics services in the community. This paper presents a brief case study of the communications network testbed and how it was applied to the Development Informatics space. It analyses the roles played by stakeholders in either assisting and sustaining or obstructing the service delivery. It makes key recommendations on best practices for research networks that can also bring informatics to disadvantaged communities. It shows how testbeds for the research of new technologies can be designed so as to allow Development Informatics work to take place on such networks.

Teleweaver: An architectural overview of a customised application server for rurality

The Siyakhula Living Lab in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa has been in existence for over a decade now. In this time, several software artefacts have been developed by students and partners with the aim of providing contextually-relevant services to the rural community. However, reliance on different platforms and paradigms has meant that the deployment of such services would be difficult to implement and maintain reliably in actual practice. What is required is a single software platform that can act as a docking station for multiple applications, as well as a routing substrate for applications living inside and outside the platform. A candidate platform to enable this is currently being integrated under the codename Teleweaver and is built from a free, open source J2EE application server and integrates with other software components. This paper provides an architectural overview of the platform and demonstrates how it provides a sustainable context for application development going forward.

HealthMessenger: An e-health service to support ICT deployments in poor areas

Development and implementation of appropriate e-services as well as revenue generation are key to deploying and sustaining ICT installations in poor areas in developing countries. The area of e-Health is a promising area for e-Services that are important to populations in poor areas and health service organisations that are already spending money on different health initiatives in these areas. This paper discusses an e-Health service that facilitates dissemination of health information to people living in poor areas and that is subsequently used to generate revenue to support deployment and development of ICT in the areas. The tool was developed within the context of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), a multi-stakeholder operation that promotes ICT for Development in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Creation of health content for the e-health service and its subsequent consumption happen in two different environments from a technological and social point of view. To enable this to happen, the e-service comprises two component applications that run in a peer-to-peer fashion. The component that is used to disseminate content for end-user consumption is called the HealthMessenger. The HealthMessenger is hosted on an environment called TeleWeaver, an application integration platform developed within the SLL to host software applications targeting people living in poor areas. The platform is customised to support services with a revenue generation component.

A Framework for the Management of Operator Policies and User Preferences for Service Compositions in the IP Multimedia Subsystem

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a telecommunication middleware platform with robust service features that enables the delivery of a wide range of services to mobile network subscribers. Network operators are encouraged to develop services from service building blocks in order to avoid redundancies by re-using existing functionality. In this environment, operators must be able to control the service execution chain in order to prevent undesirable interactions from occurring between individual building blocks. It is also in their interests to provide subscribers with personalisation options so that they can modify service compositions and define their own preferences for how they would like their services to behave during live sessions. This paper describes a solution for these challenges that involves the storage of service information in an XDMS and allows operator staff and subscribers to manage this information using the XCAP protocol. The ETSI-defined XCAP application usage named simservs was chosen to demonstrate an application usage that can be used to create service compositions in XML format. A prototype is described that uses components of the open source Mobicents project to verify the suitability of the design. This work is part of a larger effort aimed at modeling interaction management in the IMS through the use of a service broker that is part of an extended IMS service layer (EISL). The service brokers functional and structural architecture have not yet been standardised.

ARrowhead: a mobile augmented reality application using wi-fi positioning for indoor contexts

Location based services (LBS) targeted at the smartphone market are increasing in prevalence and have given rise to a plethora of location-aware applications for both indoor and outdoor contexts. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is used extensively in many of these applications for location mapping, however GPS is known to have serious limitations indoors due to signal blocking. In this work, Wi-Fi Positioning Systems (WPS) are explored with the aim of identifying a suitable alternative that works well indoors. This paper details the design of a WPS whose positioning component includes the use of trilateration and variants of the k-nearest neighbour algorithm. The resulting positioning component was tested indoors in two separate environments of different sizes, yielding an accuracy of within 1.6 m in the best-case scenario, which greatly outperforms GPS under similar conditions. Arguably, the positioning component can form the basis for any number of LBS, however in this paper; its use in supporting Augmented Reality (AR) is explored. The AR component incorporates context and preference features and permits the exploration of indoor physical spaces while layering graphical content onto the standby camera display. The resulting application was coined ARrowhead. ARrowhead was tested qualitatively and verified to perform as expected. The prototype provides a foundation for further development.

Digital Inclusion: A Model for e-Infrastructure and e-Services in Developing Countries

A large portion of the South African population is still not connected in a productive manner to the Internet, despite the existence of a government plan for public broadband, ‘SA Connect’. One reason for this could be the lack of an appropriate model, through which connectivity can be diffused in a meaningful way through all areas of South Africa. This paper presents the model developed over more than a decade of experimentation in real life settings in the Siyakhula Living Lab, a joint venture between the universities of Rhodes and Fort Hare, South Africa. The model proposes the ‘Broadband Island’ as basic e-infrastructure unit, which clusters nearby points-of-presence hosted in schools. In each Broadband Island is located an applications integration platform, TeleWeaver, which monetizes channels of access to the local community, to support the e-infrastructure while providing useful services to the population and the Government.

An IMS subscriber location function for OpenBaton — A standards based MANO environment

In the past, virtualisation, and with it the move toward the cloud, has had a strong influence on the ICT (Information Communication Technology) sector, and now seems set to revolutionise the telecommunications sector as well. The virtualisation into software artefacts of functions that would usually be deployed as hardware has come to be known as Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) through its MANO (Management and Orchestration) framework has outlined comprehensively how such functions could be orchestrated and managed over infrastructure such as the cloud. A set of functions of particular interest are the call session control functions (CSCFs) and HSS (Home Subscriber Server) of the IP Multimedia System (IMS) which perform signalling and authentication functions for multimedia calls in contexts such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE). IMS has enjoyed significant focus in the past from the research community, as such an implementation of an IMS service package has been provided in an open source MANO-compliant implementation called OpenBaton. While the service package provides the IMS CSCFs and HSS, it does not include a Subscriber Location Function (SLF) which provides a mapping function to map a subscriber identity to a hosting HSS. The SLF is an important element for building distributed networks that partition user data into multiple databases, and as such represents a useful inclusion to the developer community. This paper describes an extension to the OpenBaton service package that includes an SLF for partitioning large user populations across multiple HSSes and resolving individual addresses in real-time.

A Case Study in the Use of the Five Step Peer Evaluation Strategy to Improve a First Year Computer Literacy Course: An Exercise in Reflective Evaluation Practice

In this paper, I recount my experiences in conducting a comprehensive five step evaluative exercise which was aimed at collecting feedback from various sources in order to help inform future teaching interventions for a first year computer literacy course in a South African university. The exercise centres on a focus group study that was conducted with a number of students who had completed the course between 2013 and 2015 and solicited their feedback on the basis of their own personal experiences. The five step process in which this study was executed included collecting feedback from a critical peer in addition to synthesising the author’s own insights. The study was prompted by the author’s realization that feedback is most often mistaken for evaluation, whereas evaluation is better conceived as the triangulation of various sources of information. The use of a focus group study instead of the common feedback method of the questionnaire also helped engage the students more robustly and was better suited as a tool to collect a richer set of qualitative data. The study yielded useful insights which have implications for teaching and learning activities, assessment of student learning and the curriculum at large.

Modelling the exposure of services within next generation telecommunication networks

As mobile network operators come to terms with the inevitability of falling revenues from traditional revenue streams, many have begun exploring alternative revenue models. A prominent approach has been to encourage the development of revenue-generating services by exposing network resources to developers through an application programming interface (API). The objective is to use common Internet Protocol (IP) technologies such as web services that appeal to a wider developer audience. This movement is particularly important for developing countries due to the rapid proliferation of mobile broadband networks and the emerging entrepreneurial opportunities that exist within the mobile development space. Notably, what has been missing in this sector is a simple toolkit that developers can utilise to create prototypes. This paper presents a model for telecommunication service exposure and describes an implementation involving a mobile application, an application server and a protocol bridge that translates mobile requests to the internal telecommunication protocols.

Demo: Teleweaver - Next Generation Enabler for Rural Telecentres and Access Nodes

Summary form only given. Teleweaver is an integrated platform built from open source software that provides a framework for the delivery and deployment of services that are targeted specifically for marginalised communities. The system uses well known technologies such as Java EE, OSGi and the Spring framework to create digital nodes that can be deployed in underserved areas. Reed House Systems, the software firm behind Teleweaver, has strong links with academia through Rhodes University (coe.ru.ac.za) and uses its partnership with Siyakhula Living Labs (dwesa.org) to enable an ecosystem that focuses on developing culturally relevant services for the community. The demo will showcase the latest iteration of the Teleweaver system and will act as a tool to engage with researchers on how they can also get involved in the initiative.