Mustafa Shakir

Telecom sector of Pakistan

Cellular subscribers teledensity and broadband growth of Pakistan in the last decade.FDI, telecom investment and revenue generation in Pakistan during the last decade.Challenges related to future telecom progress in Pakistan.Business opportunities and recommendations for future telecom growth.Impact of 3G/4G services on social and corporate sectors. Pakistan has exercised major developments recently in the Telecom sector. The main focus is to extend maximum benefits to the general user in terms of having accessibility to the modern services and better quality of service as a result of competitive environment amongst the network operators. The international investors also have directly contributed towards the economy as a result of which further horizons for exploring and improving the broadband market have emerged. In this paper, we have presented the growing telecom access and statistics, investment opportunities in the sector, modern applications and the broadband developments in line with the changing orientation of the telecom industry of Pakistan.

Design of a Low-cost Underwater Wireless Sensor Network for Water Quality Monitoring

Abstract With the ongoing advancements in the field of wireless technologies and sensor networking, a lot of research is taking place in using such sensor networks for multitude monitoring situations, e.g. home, office monitoring systems, body area sensor networks, and environmental monitoring systems. These systems cost a lot and are complicated as in operating. Thus, our main goal is the development of low-cost, yet effective sensor networks for monitoring the quality of water bodies like lakes, water reservoirs, ponds, etc., Such systems would be deployed in a lake, a small reservoir, etc., which would relay back the real-time values of different parameters like pH, turbidity, temperature, etc., to the monitoring station wirelessly in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Challenging Issues in NGN Implementation and Regulation

The technological advancements in telecommunications is leading towards the trend of unification of networks and services and Next Generation Networks are rapidly growing and developing globally. NGN being an IP based network enables customers to receive voice, data and video over the same network. NGN offers reduced network and operational complexity resulting in better and reliable service. It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers also supporting generalized mobility. In the course of transition from the legacy PSTN to an IP based NGN there are many issues which need to be addressed. We would be addressing the issues relating to regulation and interconnection which arise in the course of migration to NGN. This paper also gives the benefits that the service providers and the end users are expected to gain as a result of NGN deployment. We have also put forward the scenario of NGN implementation in Pakistan analyzing the spectrum of challenges in order to have a faster transition from the legacy PSTN.

Performance and Capacity Planning of NGN

There have been various emerging trends in the deployment of telecom networks recently. Due to liberalization and technological advancements a common core network for voice and data based on MPLS has been implemented by Telecom service providers. By offering a variety of data and multimedia services, the revenue generating process can also be maximized. The economic and regulation trends also have to be synchronized for the proper and step by step replacement of traditional network by NGN. The current flow is to provide users with multitude of services thus meeting their high demands and enhancing revenues for network operators. Class 5 and Class 4 are our legacy circuit switches based upon TDM to transport voice. For handling control functions, call setup and teardown SS7 signaling was used. The traditional network was designed to support voice services only not being able to meet customers’ demands who require a variety of services at an optimum cost. The aim of this work is to present the role of NGN encompassing the telecom network, architecture and technologies. Also it has emerged as a new platform to decrease the CAPEX and OPEX of overall network infrastructure and to maximize their revenues. In this paper, we present an upcoming architecture for the transition to NGN which is future proof for going through the migration phase along with the capacity and planning of our network.

Performance Optimization of Priority Assisted CSMA/CA Mechanism of 802.15.6 under Saturation Regime

Due to the recent development in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have become a major area of interest for the developers and researchers. Human body exhibits postural mobility due to which distance variation occurs and the status of connections amongst sensors change time to time. One of the major requirements of WBAN is to prolong the network lifetime without compromising on other performance measures, i.e., delay, throughput and bandwidth efficiency. Node prioritization is one of the possible solutions to obtain optimum performance in WBAN. IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA standard splits the nodes with different user priorities based on Contention Window (CW) size. Smaller CW size is assigned to higher priority nodes. This standard helps to reduce delay, however, it is not energy efficient. In this paper, we propose a hybrid node prioritization scheme based on IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA to reduce energy consumption and maximize network lifetime. In this scheme, optimum performance is achieved by node prioritization based on CW size as well as power in respective user priority. Our proposed scheme reduces the average back off time for channel access due to CW based prioritization. Additionally, power based prioritization for a respective user priority helps to minimize required number of retransmissions. Furthermore, we also compare our scheme with IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA standard (CW assisted node prioritization) and power assisted node prioritization under postural mobility in WBAN. Mathematical expressions are derived to determine the accurate analytical model for throughput, delay, bandwidth efficiency, energy consumption and life time for each node prioritization scheme. With the intention of analytical model validation, we have performed the simulations in OMNET++/MIXIM framework. Analytical and simulation results show that our proposed hybrid node prioritization scheme outperforms other node prioritization schemes in terms of average network delay, average throughput, average bandwidth efficiency and network lifetime.