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In this paper, we analyze the data collected through in-depth interviews of migrant workers in Southern China about their mobile cultures. In particular, we focus on understanding the role that mobile cultures play in female workers’ negotiation of their social and romantic relations and leisure space and how these negotiations are directly or indirectly facilitated by development of informal literacies through their frequent short message service communicative practices. These will help us understand the lifestyle aspirations and life trajectories of the new young working women in China who are experiencing the most rapid socioeconomic changes in society and negotiating their ways of life amidst much tension between old and new values governing lifestyle aspirations, familial, and gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The RELATE interaction model is designed to support spontaneous interaction of mobile users with devices and services in their environment. The model is based on spatial references that capture the spatial relationship of a user’s device with other co-located devices. Spatial references are obtained by relative position sensing and integrated in the mobile user interface to spatially visualize the arrangement of discovered devices, and to provide direct access for interaction across devices. In this paper we discuss two prototype systems demonstrating the utility of the model in collaborative and mobile settings, and present a study on usability of spatial list and map representations for device selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the rationale, design and implementation of a system for increasing the status women in developing communities. AIR (Advancement through Interactive Radio) gives female community radio listeners a voice with which to respond to programming and to create programming content. We first describe the cost of excluding women from Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development, and explore how community radio represents an opportunity for inclusion. We draw upon feasibility studies and site visits in Southeast Kenya to support the introduction of a mechanism that enables women to “talk back” to the community radio station. Using the principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR), we argue that women will be more likely to benefit from technology-mediated opportunities for development if they themselves produce information that contributes to their advancement, rather than simply consuming information provided by others. Finally, we describe the design and implementation of simple communications device that supports this model for use in communities that are, and will remain for some time, off the electrical and cellular grid. This hand-held device enables women to record voice feedback and news for community radio. This feedback is then routed asynchronously back to the radio station through a probabilistic, delay-tolerant network, where the feedback can inform subsequent broadcasts and facilitate additional discussion. We conclude with a technical summary of the AIR prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  This paper explores the potential for use of an unaugmented commodity technology—the mobile phone—as a health promotion tool. We describe a prototype application that tracks the daily exercise activities of people, using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to analyse GSM cell signal strength and visibility to estimate a user’s movement. In a short-term study of the prototype that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflection on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. The study raised concerns regarding the reliability of ANN-facilitated activity detection in the ‘real world’. We describe some of the details of the pilot study and introduce a promising new approach to activity detection that has been developed in response to some of the issues raised by the pilot study, involving Hidden Markov Models (HMM), task modelling and unsupervised calibration. We conclude with our intended plans to develop the system further in order to carry out a longer-term clinical trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless networks that utilize dynamic channel allocation (DCA) are known to perform better than those with fixed channel allocation, in terms of the call level QoS measures such as the handoff dropping probability. On account of this, the DCA networks are usually designed without the call admission control (CAC). However, given the decrease of cell sizes, together with ever increasing mobile phone and terminal population, dynamic channel allocation policies (such as channel borrowing) may not be sufficient to cope with the hot-spot area size and its traffic intensity. This paper analyses the performance of the DCA networks, both with and without the call admission control, under the hot-spot traffic regime. In such cases, the pure DCA approach fails to ensure sufficiently low level of QoS in both the hot-spot area and the surrounding cells. We propose a CAC policy that can stabilize the QoS under non-uniform traffic, whilst being easy to integrate in the distributed DCA policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alarm correlation is a necessity in large mobile phone networks, where the alarm bursts resulting from severe failures would otherwise overload the network operators. In this paper, we describe how to realize alarm-correlation in cellular phone networks using extended logic programming. To this end, we describe an algorithm and system solving the problem, a model of a mobile phone network application, and a detailed solution for a specific scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wireless private branch exchange (PBX) system offers wireless telephone access in an office environment. In a WPBX, several base stations are connected to the PBX, and the PBX is connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Since only a small number of telephones are expected to be busy at the same time, the capacity (number of the external lines) between the PBX and the PSTN is typically smaller than the sum of the capacities (radio channels) of the individual base stations. It is important to determine the capacity of the WPBX to optimize the performance of the system. This paper proposes an analytic model and a simulation model for WPBX resource planning. Based on the workload to the WPBX, our study provides the guidelines to determine the capacities of the PBX and the base stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  A year-long ethnographic study of the use of mobile phones in Jamaica was conducted during 2004. Our findings, which are almost the exact opposite of the expectations that appear in The Economist and other sources in early 2005, are that, in Jamaica at least, the phones are not used to obtain jobs or to help individuals become entrepreneurs. For quite different reasons, however, mobile phones have become central to the survival strategies of the lowest income population. To understand why this should be, we need to examine how the phone fits within other forms of communication, and how both the phone and the phone call are evaluated. This is tantamount to asking how one person values their communication with another and under what conditions does communication become an end in itself? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic positioning and potential cost savings are popular explanations for growing consolidation in the wireless telephone industry. This research estimates economies of scale for a large panel of GTE Wireless cellular market areas. Contrary to previous findings, our results indicate scale economies exist throughout the system and provide a rationale for the industry trend of consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In telecommunications, Calling Party Pays is a billing formula that prescribes that the person who makes the call pays its full cost. Under CPP land-line to wireless phone calls have a high cost for many organizations. They can reduce this cost at the expense of installing wireless bypasses to replace land-line to wireless traffic with wireless-to-wireless traffic, when the latter is cheaper than the former. Thus, for a given time-horizon, the cost of the project is a trade-off between traffic to-wireless and the number of bypasses. We present a method to determine the number of bypasses that minimizes the expected cost of the project. This method takes into account hourly varying traffic intensity. Our method takes advantage of parallels with inventory models for rental items. Examples illustrate the economic value of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The improvement of wireless technologies and the increasing spread of mobile phones open new possibilities to perform mobile Customer-to-Customer commercial activities. In this new scenario, where users cannot rely on stable connections, it assumes a great relevance how to trust the counterpart in a transaction and how to avoid that a disconnection, possible in wireless connections, can encourage users to cheat. To tackle these issues we propose a feedback-based reputation mechanism able to detect malicious users better than other state-of-the-art techniques, as shown by the large number of experiments run to measure the accuracy of the compared methods in the most common situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]