Schlagwort-Archive: Mobile

On the TPC of the 10th Int-Conf Wired/Wireless Internet Communications (WWIC 2012)

The 10th International Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications – WWIC 2012 will be held in the magnificent island of Santorini, Greece, on June 4-6, 2012.

The goal of the conference is to present high-quality results in the field of global internetworking, and to provide a framework for research collaboration through focused discussions that will designate future research efforts and directions. In this context, the program committee will accept only a limited number of papers that meet the criteria of originality, presentation quality and topic relevance. WWIC is a single-track conference which has reached, within 9 years, the highest level of quality, which is reflected both in the level of participation as well as the acceptance ratio and the amount and quality of submitted papers. Following the conference tradition there will also be a best paper award.

Accepted papers from the Call-for-Papers (CFP) will appear in the conference proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes of Computer Science (LNCS) Series. Extended versions of selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of a competitive international journal.

5th GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms

Notes of the 5th KuVS GI/ITG Workshop „NG Service Delivery Platforms“ with the topic „Advanced Service Delivery Platforms for Mobile Networks“

QoE optimization with network layer awareness on hybrid wireless networks (T. Melia, S. Randriamasy, Alcatel-Lucent, France; D. Munaretto, M. Zorzi, Univ. Padova/CFR, Italy)
– FP7 Medieval Project
– QoE based resource management in current BWA networks (LTE but also WiFi)
– Qoe Metrics for Video – Compare with reference and/or no reference
– Use the fact that different paths trough the networks means different QoE. Access/path selection based on QoE targets
– IETF ALTO (Application Layer Optimization) Working Group
— Describes attributes of caches and of their locations
— ALTO server provides ALTO clients with info on topology, routing cost, etc
– ALTO stores the network cost and needs to be combined with application layer metrics
– ALTO a tool for the operator to evaluate the performance of network caches
– In Medival ALTO not opened to users, ie operator does not reveal network-internals

Analysis of managed and OTT streaming services in mobile networks (J. Eisl, G. Kuhn, M. Lott, Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany; M. Varela, J. Prokkola, T. Mäki, J–P. Laulajainen, VTT, Finland)
Presented by M. Lott, Head of Service Control & Identity Management
– Compares „managed services“ (with QoS/QoE support by operators) and OTT services
– Different devices, different services (Mobile TV, Streaming Video, etc)
– Measurements via tcpdump, Wireshark, and tool developed by VTT
– OTT services mostly provided over HTTP, some use RTP/RTSP
– Microsoft Smoth Streaming and Apple HTTP Live Streaming are HTTP-based adaptive streaming protocols
– Conclusions: Rate adaptation not widely used, not supported by many servers, HTTP-based adaptations proprietary
– Conclusion: Managed services not significantly better than OTT services
— Paper author/NSN concludes: Means current QoS/QoE mechanisms are ineffective; more research required

FoG and Clouds: On Optimizing QoE for YouTube (T. Hoßfeld, F. Liers, T. Volkert, R. Schatz, Univ. Würzburg, Germany; Univ. Ilmenau, Germany; FTW Vienna, Austria
– Trend away from QoS towards QoE
– How to manage/optimize networks for QoE
– For HTTP-based video streaming there is no „low quality“, video will simply stall if too few resources
– Proposed: YouTube QoE metric that covers „stalling“
– Extensive study with human subjects to identify key criteria for „video quality“
– Mapping between „MOS and Number of Stalls“
– Conclusion: Users accept only very very few stalls (1 to no) and only very short stalls (exponential decrease of MOS)
– Equation for initial caching delay versus bandwidth provisioning

Application and Quality of Experience Aware Resource Management (D. Stähle, Univ. Würzburg, Germany)
– Look for ways to achieve win/win situation through network/user cooperation
– Possible with QoE as metric?
– And for Mesh-Networks?
– AquareYoumon tool by Uni Wuerzburg (Youtube QoE over mesh networks)
– YoMo – client-based application monitoring

MediaCloud – A Distributed Service Platform for Media Services (M. Bauer, S. Braun, P. Domschitz, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Germany)
– Pardigm shift expected away from „Big Iron“ approach (datacenter centric) towards distributed „MediaCloud“
– A new approach to „building distributed services“
— Flow-driven model, Atomic execution model;
— Work on media chunks, not IP packets
– G-Streamer framework goes a bit into this direction

Seamless Service Provision in P2P Service Overlays (K. Panitzek, I. Schweizer, M. Ikramy and Max Mühlhäuser, TU Darmstadt, Germany)
– P2P service overlays – distribution and execution of applications, composition of services
– Seamless service migration between peers
– MudoCore middleware – for code migration between peers
– Chord DHT – for distributed service registry

IEEE Globecom 2010

IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (IEEE GLOBECOM) is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society and high up on my annual conference must-attends.

This year, IEEE Globecom 2010, is held in Miami, Florida and lines-up seamlessly in the hall of fame of this conference series. With 2500 attendees on-site it sets a new record and as usual it features a very comprehensive program with a good number of high-profile speakers from business as well as academia.

Keynote by Yoshihiro Obata, CTO of eAccess Ltd in Japan
A very interesting talk, excellent presentation with a very good mix of industry/company background/insight and technological/research challenges. This is the style of talks you look for at IEEE Globecom.

Here is what Mr Obata had to tell:

– Traditionally, Telco services were controlled by operators (e.g. SMS). With IP services control moves towards devices/applications
– And terminal are no any longer provided by the operator, huge variety in devices, competition high (e.g. Apple vs Google)

– Smart-phones turn signaling (traffic) into a huge issue for operators. As control went from network to devices operators cant control / police users effectively. This essentially prevents M2M introduction

– Highest expenses are still with the backbone, eAccess flat rate offers were only possible since they own a backbone, especially in wireless networks is the backbone cost what matters; base stations are not relatively inexpensive

– Volume and characteristic of traffic by corporate users does not cause trouble, i.e. corporate users behave as they follow a certain (manageable) pattern (e.g. peak traffic).

– Mobile vs Fixed: The peak (busy hour) in mobile networks is broad (TMB: statistically stationary) versus traffic in fixed networks (ie DSL) shows very sharp/short peaks (instationary) -> TMB: This has consequences to admission control!

– Reasoning: mobile terminals/services are simpler to use, by potentially more singles and younger users, which are attached for longer periods to their terminals; In contrast, Internet services over fixed (cable, DSL, etc) access require a greater effort to start, in particular the terminal (PC, laptop, etc) and hence users start-use-shut.

– On traffic patterns: 300K (2-5%) users take 50% of the capacity for peer-to-peer traffic, still no issue for state-of-the-art technlogy, annoying though, but the network needs to be sized for full capacity anyways.

– On business in general, telcos need to adapt to change as meanwhile nearly 30% of the user spending goes to the terminal and this takes a major part of the overall budget

– A new service in Japan is „Pocket WiFi, WiFi allows terminals to concurrently access the network with one subscription. This gives meanwhile three options for mobile operators – hotspots, mirco cells, pocket wifi – still unclear which will predominate

Kevin Fall (Intel) WSN Forum
– Observation on WSNs – mostly worried with power consumption, use essentially the same network architecture as any other devices, people mostly use them for trivial scenarios (room temperature monitoring)

– Programming WSNs as essembles instead can be a basis for innovative scenarios

– Issues: disconnection, addressing (location/ID, address space)

– Some ideas/solutions: DTN (storage/caching), use URIs for addressing/naming anything

– Info-networking (content-centric or data-centric networking) that put data/information in the center of design, architecture, operations instead of hosts

Edward Knightly (Rice Uni) WSN Forum
Edward, how was giving a keynote at my BWA workshop in 2008, talked about „sensing“ in general and took WSNs into the vehicular, smart grid, and eHealth domain. Nothing really new, some of the slides are indeed known for a while (eHealth). What was new though, is that he is promoting „Visible Light Communication“ as a technology for vehicular communications.

H. Atarashi (NTT DOCOMO) 4G Operator Perspectives
– DOCOMO to deploy LTE comercially in Dec 2010, initially over legacy 3G infrastructure, terminals will support dual-mode

– 3 deployment scenarios, remote-radio-head, cabinet-type, indoor

– Remote radio head: base stations (eNodeB) are deployed somewhere and connect over fiber to the …

– ~1000BS by end of 2010, 5000 by end of 2011, 15000 by end of 2012 (40% POP coverage)

China Mobile
– 564m subscribers, ~500000 GSM base stations
– LTE deployment in 2011, several trials conducted with several manufacturers involved (terminal + network), LTE-TD meets all expectations

COMCAST IPv6 Forum
– CDNs are starting migration strategies this year (2011)
– Mind that this involves many aspects, way beyond the network, e.g. OS, Apps, OSS tools, CRM, Accounting, BSS in general
– To wait is a risk: v6 introduction takes time, Google needed 3 years
– And there will be more NAT to come in the meantime
– But 90% of v6-readiness can be achieved without turning v6 on!
– How to save cost? Put v6-readiness in your product strategy (TMB: that“s easy said ..) and mind that a customer may need to turn NAT on in order to access your content
– But isn“t v6 broken? No, that“s mostly an issue on your consumer-side and mind, ISP-NAT does not scale and add complexity/unwanted control
– The today challenge of v6 is not so much technology, it“s training of field personell, sales, support, etc
– Comcast is virtually v6 ready

Nokia IPv6 Forum
– Symbian is v6 ready since quite a while
– NAT versus v6, keep-alive versus idle but connected -> NAT drains your mobile“s battery
– Operators will not switch on Voice over LTE in the near future
– More details on NAT: keep-alive commonly in 40sec-5min intervals, can decrease your standby time from days to hours, many different/imcompatible tunneling, very different NATs (home, office, hotspots, ISP-NAT, etc) in terms of traversal mechanisms, frequently poor quality code, mind multi-level NAT (cascades)
– T-Mobile and Nokia run v6-trial in the USA, Nokia supports cell+wifi v6 in the N900 dual-stack.

Some random notes
– JND theory, „just noticable distortion“, widely used theory for picture quality evaluation (subjective)

– Wireless network usage is not uniform, one practical example shows 15% of the cells generate 50% of total traffic

– Most of the traffic in the future is expected to come from indoor environments

Mobile Cloud Computing

Is there something like „Mobile Cloud Computing“? (a question I am after since early 2009)

A quick Internet research provides evidence that MCC might indeed get away from being a „bwc“ (buzz word combination) and turn into something substantial.

Fundamental Reflections on MCC
– MCC basic elements: Mobile Device, Mobile Network, Cloud Computing (IaaS/PaaS), Cloud Serivce (SaaS)
– Mobile Devices: The dominant share will remain low-end, with very limited resources
– Mobile Networks: Shannon/Nyquist, channel characteristics/impairments
– Cloud Computing: Depends on communications, provides virtually unlimted resources on-demand, …
– Users look for something that may be called „on-service, on-demand, on-(any)-device“

A Few Resources
Mobile Cloud Computing Demo
ABI Research : Enterprise Mobile Cloud Computing
ABI Research: Mobile Cloud Applications

ICIN 2010 in Berlin

I was attending ICIN 2010 in Berlin. My keynote on „Global Future Internet Research“ can be found on the conference website (link below).

Worthy conference with a good number of talks/attendees. Particularly interesting I found the mixture of people from research and those working on innovation and/or general management.

Few takeaways:
+ IaaS (network+storage+computing) seen as good business model for telcos in the future
+ Value of enforcing an extra revenue share from Google questionable since 25bn (Google) versus 1000bn (Telcos) is peanuts (CEO of Northstream).
+ Appstores/developer communities for telcos of limited value since Appstore mainly a tool for device sales (mobile device manufacturers)
+ Telco““““s shall better look into many smaller business models rather than looking for the next SMS-like killer app (H. Arnold, T-Labs)

The slides of the keynote speakers are meanwhile available for download

1st FOKUS FUSECO Forum 2010

I am attending the 1st FUSECO Forum in Berlin, at Fraunhofer FOKUSFUSECO Forum 2010

A few takeaways (slides at download)
HP Baumeister – Fraunhofer Digital Media Technologies, USA
+ Verizon happy to be a „bit pipe provider“ and teams-up with Skype exclusively

Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany
+ Deployment (especially integration) of EPC into existing infrastructure true challenge (despite the streamlined architecture of EPC itself)
+ Roaming (in particular IMS roaming) and QoS (different signalling) big challenge
+ Roaming primarily a European issue
+ Challenge with signalling load in LTE due to non-standard conform feature (immediate dormant mode) of smart phones (for energy saving). Operators don““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““t have any means to control signaling in their networks
+ Another challenge related to signaling is that LTE/EPS uses Diameter exclusively and hence is not simple to integrate into existing SS7-based 2G/3G systems
+ IMS still way too much focused on fixed networks

Giulio Maggiore – Telecom Italia, Italy / ETSI TC INT Chairman, France
+ IMS & EPC Interoperability to be released by ETSI TC INT in 2011
+ Workshop 3GPP rel 8 Implementation, Deployment and Testing, 24-25 Nov 2010, Sophia Antipolis, FR

Industry panel:
Markus Beckmann, Accenture, Germany, Sven Akesson, Ericsson, Sweden, Wolfgang Hummel (Telco SM), HP, Germany, Cornel Pampu, Huawei Technologies, Germany, Bernd Wunderlich (Telco SM), IBM Deutschland, Germany
Thorsten Robrecht (Head of Global LTE), Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany, Alain Dakroub, Tekelec, France

+ NSN: currently has (global) 52% of GSM subsribers and 72% of WCDMA, currently 32 LTE networks globally (LTAM, Asia), Germany also close to forefront, NSN roughly 1M LTE basestations deployed globally, devices are already there and comercially available in weeks/month, 50% of NSNs business is already operating networks, 45K LTE basestations to be deployed by Lightsquared and operated by NSN
+ IBM: Germany decreasing telco market, question what can LTE do to solve this – generate more revenue?, Operators have to operate 2G, 2.5G, 3G and soon 4G networks but revenues shrink (~2 percent), challenge / opportunity is cloud computing for enterprises, OTT-provider kept the consumer based for them
+ HP: Offers a combined HLR+HSS product, better work with OTT (like Goolge) rather to fight them
+ Ericsson: IMS already deployed (mostly in fixed domain), Ericsson has a unit Global Services and running (deploying/operating) already hundreds of networks
+ Accenture: One challenge with these technologies is the process change that comes along with convergence (e.g. by EPC/SAE), massive impact on IT systems, changes needed in ticketing, customer support, OSS/BSS, etc, key element to address pressure of decreasing revenues is out sourcing to dedicated specialists in countries abroad (e.g. India, Asia, East-Europe) – examples engineering, operations (e.g. provisioning in shared service centers) and similar.

Q&A: Shall operators outsource core services like voice? Accenture: better not

M2M Opportunities – Lessons Learned from the US Market
Ronald M. Jubainville, Sprint, UK
+ Sprint SIP-enabled IMS network since Aug 9th 2006, First US 4G network in the US, World““““s first 3G/4G Android phone
+ What matters are devices, e.g. Mobile ATMs (average load per Mobile ATM is 6MB/month)
+ Usage-based insurance for cars with 183M users operational

Alfonso Ehijo, Telmex International, Latin America / University of Chile
+ Verizon does befriend the idea of bit-pipe provider due to compensation by several exlusive partnerships with Google, Skype, and similar content/service providers
+ Relationship (the R in smart) is what really matters (c.f. Verizon)

Roberto Minerva, Telecom Italia, Italy
+ Too many network APIs out there
+ The problem is that Telco““““s are accountable and for that make usage of network APIs complex and heavy
+ Issue is the difference between global Internet services and local communication (network) services
+ IMS will not be able to support services for business services
+ OneAPI is too late
+ Interoperability is an issue for telcos, not the users
+ WebCo(mpanies) are much faster and release alpha versions and by that involve the users early – versus – Telco““““s develop standards over years …

Q&A: There is a big opportunity in the _private_ cloud (Google is not (yet) there) says Sprint

Prof. Marc Drüner, trommsdorff + drüner, Germany
+ Marketing has to go online, „go where the customers are“, people expect the company comes to them,
+ Cool Internet App: Mint.com – manage your financials using the wisdom of the crowds!
+ 75% percent of Indian youth has first contact with Internet via mobile devices
+ Extensive study of Retail Use Cases available by the company

Boaz Zilberman, fring, Israel
+ IMS is a waste of time, too complex, too heavy,
+ Mobile app industry leapfroged IMS

Sebastian Krems, ITCcon GmbH, Germany
+ Wholesale is key to the future and this means partnership
+ Wholesale industry in the telco domain behind to other industries
+ Roughly 250MB of information per year/person, total 1-2extabyte/year
+ Telco industry sustained 50% of price decline/year for the last 30 years
+ Wholesale today: long distance: doesn““““t make a good business anymore -> efficiency and scale are king; access: potential for a long-term business for investors who can sustain a steep ramp-up
+ In the future – wholesale will be all over the place!

Dr. Ralf G. Herrtwich, Daimler AG, Germany
+ The most profitable pieces in a car „integrated solutions“
+ So far web-experience in vehicles are lousy! Network doesn““““t support 200km/h ! – LTE could be the solution

Philipp Freudenberger, SAP, Germany
+ SAP about to take a bold step into the (enterprise) mobility domain (c.f. Sybase acquisition), along with SAP““““s strive for broader adoption of its solutions (goal of 1bn users by end of 2010)
+ Value chains get more and more sophisticated, increasing number of players, stakeholders, – business networks
+ How to make money out of an increasing amount of information? – Example: „from starvation to restaurant to food and payment“, „collaborative eCare“, „utilities – increased collaboration by smart cars, smart meters“, „retail – highly collaborative since customers can use real-time offer/price comparisions“

Closing Note by the Chairman – Thomas Magedanz, TU Berlin / Fraunhofer FOKUS
+ Still many open questions to be answered, especially in view of the more complex value chains in the future
+ Will there be a common platform in the future that supports this value chains and allows for collaborative value proposition?
+ This will be addressed by „Future Internet Research“ !

Epilog (by TMB)

* Some Teminology
LTE = Long Term Evolution (also known as eUTRAN)
SAE = System Architecture Evolution
(3GPP technical study item defining EPC)
EPC = Evolved Packet Core
EPS = Evolved Packet System incl EPC, LTE and terminal