Radhika Jain

Issues in emerging 4G wireless networks

Researchers and vendors are expressing a growing interest in 4G wireless networks that support global roaming across multiple wireless and mobile networks. With this feature, users will have access to different services, increased coverage, the convenience of a single device, one bill with a reduced total access cost, and more reliable wireless access even with the failure or loss of one or more networks. 4G networks will also feature IP interoperability for seamless mobile Internet access and bit rates of 50 Mbps or more. Because deployment of 4G wireless technology is not expected until 2006 or even later, developers will hopefully have time to resolve issues involving multiple heterogeneous networks.

Wireless in the enterprise: requirements, solutions and research directions

In the last few years, wireless networking has seen considerable interest among service providers, users, vendors and content developers. Significant advances have been made in devices, applications, middleware and networking infrastructure. With wireless becoming such a mainstream technology, there is a growing interest in increasing its usage in the enterprise environment. Before wireless solutions can be deployed widely, the requirements of the enterprise environment and capabilities and limitations of wireless technologies must be addressed. In this study, we analyse and discuss the enterprise requirements and how such requirements can be met by the current and emerging wireless infrastructure. In particular, the major requirements are dependability, security, coverage, ease-of-use, devices, network interoperability and cost. Some of these requirements are addressed in the paper, and we also present a dependable, secure and scalable solution for the emerging wireless enterprise. Since this is an emerging area, we present several possible approaches to conduct research in wireless enterprise.

Web Services Composition with Traceability Centered on Dependency

Web services composition is becoming increasingly important as organizations are now getting ready to provide more complex service-based applications. Contemporary literature on the web services composition primarily addresses various aspects of composition for example, automated composition, quality-driven composition, and semantic composition. These approaches, however, do not adequately address the various dependencies among the tasks performed by the web services. Such dependencies could potentially affect how the web services are composed. Additionally business rules play a crucial role for achieving dynamic composition of web services. In this article we present our task dependency approach for web services composition driven by business rules.

Knowledge networking to support medical new product development

New product development (NPD) in the pharmaceutical industry is very knowledge intensive. Knowledge generated and used during medical NPD processes is fragmented and distributed across various phases and artifacts. Many challenges in medical NPD can be addressed by the integration of this fragmented knowledge. We propose the creation and use of knowledge networks to address these challenges. Based on a case study conducted in a leading pharmaceutical company, we have developed a knowledge framework that represents knowledge fragments that need to be integrated to support medical NPD. We have also developed a prototype system that supports knowledge integration using knowledge networks. We illustrate the capabilities of the system through scenarios drawn from the case study. Qualitative validation of our approach is also presented.

Assessing Green IT Initiatives Using the Balanced Scorecard

By expanding the balanced scorecard to incorporate sυstainability perspectives, the authors analyze current green IT initiatives to explore how IT can contribute to enterprise-wide sustainability performance.

Using traceability to mitigate cognitive biases in software development

cognitive Biases in Problem-solving People employ cognitive biases to reduce uncertainty and complexity when processing information during problem solving. 11 While the effects of these biases have been well studied in general problem-solving, their impact on software development has gained limited attention. These biases are often employed to simplify complex inference tasks to more manageable proportions. 8 The most common cognitive biases experienced during problem-solving include anchoring and adjustment , availability, and confirmation. Anchoring and adjustment bias This bias results from people forming initial estimates about a problem and adjusting their initial estimates to arrive at more appropriate final solutions .

Managing context in business process management systems

Businesses need to continuously focus on change and innovation in order to survive in dynamic environments. The ability of an organization to deploy appropriate business processes requires that the fit between business processes and systems that support the management of these processes is continuously maintained and evolved. Acquisition and use of the knowledge about the context in which business processes are defined, modified, and implemented can help maintain this fit. We identify requirements for a business process management system (BPMS) capable of managing contextual knowledge. Based on these requirements, we have enhanced KOPeR, a knowledge-based system for business process improvement, with an explanation facility that can acquire and maintain knowledge about the context behind process definitions and design choices. A case study that illustrates the functionalities of this system which is designed to improve the fit between business processes and BPMS is presented.

Supporting quality of service in multiple heterogeneous wireless networks

As users become mobile across multiple heterogeneous wireless networks, supporting quality of service across such networks becomes an important issue. In this paper, we present several different QoS schemes designed for allowing QoS support among multiple heterogeneous wireless networks. Fault-tolerant architectures are also introduced to provide continued QoS support in the case of network failures. In addition to an overlay or hierarchical wireless architecture, we believe that it may be possible to achieve a certain level of fault tolerance by allowing users to access one of several wireless networks. Such a level of fault tolerance is likely to be time and location-dependent. A simulation model has been developed to evaluate the effectiveness of various fault-tolerant architectures and schemes in terms of QoS improvement. The simulation model will be extended to grow into a network simulator for designing wireless networks with a certain QoS guarantees.

The Roles of Contextual Elements in Post-Merger Common Platform Development: An Empirical Investigation

With congeneric mergers, which involve firms with interrelated but not identical business lines that develop diverse products and services, a major challenge for organizations is the development of a common platform that fulfills similar business functions across multiple divisions. Through a field study of a post-merger common platform development initiative, we develop a framework that highlights how environmental and organizational contexts shape the process of common platform development (CPD). Our study provides an account of how the focal organization transitioned to a platform-based approach by achieving a balance between stable and flexible aspects of the common platform through negotiations among the divisions acquired through mergers and acquisitions. These negotiations were enabled through various boundary-spanning activities and the guided successive enrichment of boundary objects used in CPD process.

Improving quality of service for streaming multimedia applications in ubiquitous mobile environment

Despite the great potential demonstrated by the multimedia-rich data in various business applications, none of the prior research has addressed the design of high-quality access to the multimedia content in heterogeneous wireless networking environment. In this research, we have presented a partial pre-retrieval and buffering scheme to improve various quality of service (QoS) parameters for multimedia content for in such context. Specifically it addresses the three important QoS parameters namely delay, delay variation, and information loss that directly impact the mobile users quality of experience indicators. Here we have also presented the analysis of the buffering requirements and the related issues for high-quality access to the multimedia content in such environment. Results of this research have potential to improve the understanding of these multimedia QoS parameters for ubiquitous wireless infrastructures.