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Spatial data on a cellular network load can be used to develop commercial and public services. However, such data is calculated based on individual users' behavior and can contravene their privacy rights. Moreover, direct tracking of individual devices violates the European Union's regulations. To solve this issue, we propose to use data aggregated in individual cells of the public land mobile network without tracking an individual mobile device in the entire process. To prove that the proposed data collection method is useful, we compared the obtained results with a closed-circuit television system in an estimation of the number of people. The proposed system is sensitive enough to detect untypical global events in an urban area and distinguish transport demand zones of various types as we showed on real data from the City of Warsaw.

The initial deployment of the 5G service is based on 5G‐non‐standalone access option 3, also called dual EN‐DC connectivity. The selection of the 4G radio access network is initiated by the mobile. The synchronization signal identifies the cell with the physical layer cell identit. Cell re‐selection is also based on the public land mobile network priority list stored in the Universal Subscriber Identity Module module. The random access procedure is said to be with contention when the mobile randomly chooses the resources. The mobile synchronizes on the PCell of the target en‐gNB entity and performs the random access procedure without contention. The NG interface management procedure allows NG‐C interoperability information to be exchanged between the next‐generation radio access network node and the core network. A bandwidth part is a contiguous set of physical resource blocks, selected from a contiguous subset of the common resource blocks for a given numerology on a given carrier.

5G cellular system (also referred to as New Radio (NR)) is getting deployed around the world in two modes popularly known as a Non-Standalone (NSA) mode with 4G and a Standalone mode (SA). The acquisition of a 5G cell is entirely different in NSA mode and SA mode. In NSA mode, the network provides the frequency and Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) values to a User Equipment (UE) through signaling messages for acquiring 5G cells. While in SA mode, the UE performs frequency scanning within different supported bands to search the synchronization signal blocks (SSB) for 5G cell acquisition. In a wireless system, the frequency scan time during cell selection on a Radio Access Technology (RAT) is a crucial performance indicator. In 5G, there are two types of Frequency Ranges (FR): range 1 (FR1 or sub6GHz) and range 2 (FR2 or mmWave), and these ranges are on high-frequency spectrums. So, the width of these bands is large with an increased number of frequencies. As a result, the band scan becomes time-consuming and leads to delayed 5G cell acquisition, further degrading the poor user experiences. Hence reducing 5G frequency scanning time is still an open research problem area for an improved 5G cell selection experience. To solve the above problem, to the best of our knowledge, this paper, for the first time, proposes a new call flow to optimize NR frequency scanning using a federated dynamic list to reduce the scanning time. With the proposed novel idea, the 5G frequency scanning time was reduced by ~95% than the conventional method, depending on the number of entries in the list.

Providing seamless connectivity and services across national borders are intricate challenges with multifarious underlying aspects, ranging from the network management to business and political considerations. Since the cross-border inter-Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) network handover is currently not available in European cellular networks, we present a complementary approach, diminishing the connectivity gap to a minimum. By leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), we establish a dynamic, secure data exchange and management solution between several Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) of different countries. Systematically integrating foreign cell and base station parameter (i.e., Radio Access Network (RAN) data) of border regions into the internal network management systems permits their usage in standardized Mobility Management procedures. We demonstrate that this type of collaboration on the inter-MNO network governance considerably improves the network quality and customer experience when crossing national borders. Since foreign RAN data is also required for the inter-PLMN network handover (and can serve many additional purposes) and provided that our solution is not relying on any specific mobile network technology generation (e.g., 4G or 5G), we conclude that it is a fundamental step towards an inter-MNO ecosystem beyond 5G.

The new 5G networks must face the challenge to fulfill multiple requirements in different use cases, applications and verticals. These networks are designed to provide strict Quality of Service (QoS) compliance independently of the network conditions in each use case. Some use cases are deployed in Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN), infrastructures that are managed by mobile network operators. However, for other use cases, devices are connected to services in private networks named Non-Public Networks (NPNs). Network slicing is the 5G concept that addresses the compliance of multiple services requirements on the same network by virtualizing the physical network infrastructure. Network Slices (NSs) are created to manage the different requirements above and to ensure coexistence between these different requirements. In this work, we avail from network slicing concept to create a solution for NPNs in e-health environments which maintains QoS and privacy requirements among slices. Moreover, we also propose a blockchain mechanism to secure the NS management layer. This mechanism ensures data integrity and reliability for the NSs settings. We validate our approach by demonstrating our comprehensive solution to secure e-health environments sensitive data and the management of the slices by the e-health environments. We deployed a Proof of Concept (PoC) using the 5G EmPOWER system and a public blockchain and we evaluate some performance metrics in different scenarios.

This chapters provide a concise description of the 3GPP standards for the 5G System (5GS) and highlight the major enhancements over 4G. Network slicing, virtualization, and edge computing with enhanced connectivity, session/mobility management are some key enhancements. They cater to the requirements of a diverse set of services requiring low latency, high reliability or a massive number of connections for short, intermittent periods over the same network.

During emergencies LTE/5G-based public mobile land networks (PLMNs) restrict network access by normal users, which means a lack of service reliability which limits application of LTE/5G for machine-type communication (MTC) in critical applications, such as power systems This paper shows how existing LTE/5G features can be used to differentiate MTC of devices in a microgrid from other MTC or human-to-human (H2H) communication and ensure that these microgrid devices have service during emergencies, which enables use of LTE/5G communication to co-ordinate the use of distributed energy resources (DER) in microgrids, so that they can autarkically perform blackout recovery of an islanded microgrid. It is shown that this method allows the blackout recovery 100 times faster than with a conventional black start. The microgrid blackout recovery is demonstrated using the LTE/5G PLMN Access Barring feature. The disadvantage of using PLMN-based Access Barring is the need to define two separate PLMNs in one radio cell, which is an inefficient use of radio spectrum. However, this can be avoided by using the Extended Access Class Barring (EAB) override or application-specific congestion control (ACDC) features of the CAT-M1 low-power wide-area MTC technology, which are included in LTE and 5G standards.

5G networks are envisioned to provide high Quality of Service (QoS) for several use cases that differ on their network requirements and where they should be deployed. Some use cases are deployed in Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) infrastructures that are managed by mobile network operators. However, for other use cases, devices connect to the services over private networks or Non-Public Network (NPN). The NPN deployment is mostly envisioned by companies that will benefit from Industry 4.0 and also eHealth to enhance QoS and network security. Network slicing is the 5G concept that comes to address the different service requirements over the same network. In this paper, we present an experimental study on deploying a network slicing solution for an NPN in health environments. This solution aims to provide both performance isolation over WiFi networks and privacy isolating the service traffic over the NPN network backhaul on the way to the application server, thus providing data confidentiality.

Given Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN) ubiquitous infrastructure and excellent coverage, they can be used for providing location information for various location-based services, especially in indoor environments. This paper investigates indoor positioning solutions which utilize received signal strength measurements obtained by mobile device from PLMN cells belonging to multiple mobile network operators. Two indoor positioning methods, based on Support Vector Machine learning algorithms and space-partitioning principle, are proposed. The first method utilizes Support Vector Regression (SVR) algorithm, whilst the second one introduces space-partitioning principle and the combined use of Support Vector Classification and SVR algorithms. The proposed techniques are thoroughly investigated in a real indoor environment. In addition, several criteria for choosing relevant cells for the positioning purposes have been explored. Positioning with SVR has demonstrated good results, while utilizing space-partitioning principle has further reduced the average positioning error by 27%. Moreover, the proposed solution has outperformed positioning methods based on k Nearest Neighbours and Artificial Neural Networks, when implemented in the same verification test bed.

The drastic growth of mobile traffic greatly challenges the capacity of mobile infrastructures. Dense deployment of low-power small cells helps alleviate the congestion in the radio access network, yet it also introduces large complexity for network management. Software-defined radio access network has been proposed to tackle the added complexity. However, existing software-defined solutions rely on a fully centralized control plane to make decisions for the whole network, which greatly limits the scalability and responsiveness of the control plane. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical software-defined radio access network architecture. The proposed architecture leverages the hierarchical structure of radio access networks, deploying additional local controllers near the network edge. Utilizing the intrinsic locality in radio access networks, it offloads control tasks from the central controller to local controllers with limited overhead introduced. Under the architecture, a distributed optimization framework is proposed, and a typical optimization problem is studied to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and framework. Both analysis and experiments validate that the proposed architecture and framework can improve the network objective during the optimization, meanwhile balancing load and improving scalability and responsiveness.

Wireless ad hoc networks use mobile devices to deliver services supported by high-speed network connections and high-speed data transmissions in real time. These devices (network nodes) typically act as the network infrastructure to forward data to other nodes from a source to the destination. However, several constraints (e.g., processor, energy consumption, and bandwidth) affect the overall network performance. Cooperation strategies have been considered as a solution to such network limitations and constraints. Recent studies have presented cooperation mechanisms as a solution to unstable network infrastructures where mobile nodes cooperate with each other, forwarding data and performing all the networking functionalities. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art on cooperation strategies and algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks and delay-tolerant networks. These challenged networks frequently comprise situations where traditional Internet protocols fail to effectively provide desired or expected communication. This paper focuses on cooperation incentive-based approaches for network architectures that support mobile devices and are challenged by mobility constraints such as battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. The surveyed approaches' merits and weaknesses are discussed, and open issues are identified. Finally, conclusions are detailed.

Unlike other radio signal services, 5G is anticipated to play a huge role in offering services to heterogeneous networks, technologies, and devices operating in different geographic regions to fulfill the high expectation of users with relatively low energy consumption, which implies the necessity for moving from a system-centric design to a more user- or even human- and data- centric design paradigm “to keep the human in the loop” in future network. It drives us to design a system with capacity to allocate network resource dynamically according to feedback from users. This paper presents a Human-In-The-Loop architecture for mobile network that discovers users’ needs on network resource by understanding data traffic usage behavior of users. Based on real data traffic of mobile network, we analyze data traffic patterns of heavy and normal users from the view of online browsing behavior and urban functional area to explain how and why the data traffic is consumed. Then we propose a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model based solution to correlate data traffic, user behavior, and urban ecology to gain deep insights into spatio-temporal dynamic of data traffic usage behavior for different groups of users. Drawing upon results from a comprehensive study of users in a metropolitan city in China, we achieve a broad understanding about the difference of data traffic usage patterns of heavy and normal user: (1) besides the amount of generated data traffic, two groups of users can be easily distinguished by usage behavior of limited number of applications at midnight, (2) the functions of locations have huge impact on data usage patterns of users, which implies that urban ecology will shape users’ online behavior. The results of this work can potentially be exploited to help to allocate network resource, improve Quality of Experience according to users’ needs, and even design the future network.

The ever-increasing mobile traffic has inspired deployment of capacity and performance enhancing network services within mobile networks. Owing to recent advances in network function virtualization, such network services can be flexibly and cost-efficiently deployed in the mobile network as software components, avoiding the need for costly hardware deployment. Nevertheless, this complicates network planning by bringing the need for service function chaining. In this paper, we study mobile network planning through a software-defined approach, considering both quality-of-service and reliability of different classes of traffic. We define and formulate the traffic steering problem for service function chaining in mobile networks, which turns out to be $\mathcal {NP}$ -hard. We then develop a fast approximation scheme for the problem, and evaluate its performance via extensive simulation experiments. The results show that our algorithm is near-optimal, and achieves much better performance compared with baseline algorithms.

Back in 1998, I remember receiving my first second-generation (2G) mobile assignment at telecommunications vendor Nortel: a bid for Hutchison in Australia, a small alternate operator. At that time, I had already grown accustomed to modeling network traffic on traditional voice networks and was beginning to look at the impact of the Internet on data network dimensioning. In Australia, we were still relying on the public switched telephone network to dial up the Internet from homes, the Integrated Services Digital Network in small-to-medium enterprises, and leased lines for larger corporates and the government. But modeling mobile traffic was a different affair.

The demand of mobile traffic increases tremendously as various Internet services are provided to mobile phones and computing devices, making mobile carriers increase the capacity of their cellular network. Since current cell towers and auxiliary devices cannot carry an excessive amount of traffic, several mobile carriers try to install low cost wireless equipment such as a Wi-Fi access point (AP) in order to offload overloaded traffic on cell towers. However, APs are installed randomly unlike cell towers because they can be installed by anyone and anywhere. The randomized allocation of APs incurs interference that causes serious degradation of wireless communication quality. Therefore, it is necessary to design mobile devices to use the environment or channel that contains the least interference for proper Wi-Fi communication. In order to make a mobile device experience the best wireless download quality, this paper proposes a novel AP selection mechanism that selects an AP that contains the least interference level compared to others with different number of communicating devices and amount of traffic load. The proposed selection mechanism does not require any additional feedback from nearby devices or APs. Performance evaluation was done by using real mobile devices with open source platform called Android.

5G networks will support very diverse and challenging requirements. Network slicing offers an effective way to unlock the full potential of 5G networks and meet those requirements using a common network infrastructure. This article presents a cloud-native approach to network slicing that advances a fundamental rethinking of the mobile network to shift its architectural vision from a network of entities to a network of capabilities, and its driving purpose from a network for connectivity to a network for services. The approach covers the entire life cycle of network slices, encompassing their design, creation, deployment, customization, and optimization. We provide an overview of our cloud-native approach to network slicing and describe a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates its key principles.

Increasing customer demand coupled with limitations in current fourth-generation (4G) wireless mobile networks and advances toward the next-generation wireless mobile network have all together created a need for us to look at what customers today expect from the upcoming fifth-generation (5G) network. This study was conducted among existing 4G users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia. The research was completed in two parts: qualitative and quantitative. The quantitative part was accomplished by performing data collection and selection through surveys and data evaluation by structural equation modeling (SEM) using SMARTPLS.

In the past decade, mobile devices and applications have experienced an explosive growth, and users are expecting higher data rates and better quality services every year. In this paper, we propose several ideas to increase the functionality and capacity of wireless networks using software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing technologies. Connections between users and services in mobile networks typically have to pass through a required set of middleboxes. The complex routing is one of the major impetus for the SDN paradigm, which enables flexible policy-aware routing in the next generation mobile networks. In addition, the high costs of middleboxes and limited capabilities of mobile devices call for revolutionary virtualization technologies enabled by cloud computing. Based on these, we consider an online routing problem for mobile networks with SDN and cloud computing. In this problem, connection requests are given one at a time (as in a real mobile system), and the objective is to steer traffic flows to maximize the total amount of traffic accepted over time, subject to capacity, budget, policy, and quality of service constraints. A fast log-competitive approximation algorithm is developed based on time-dependent duals.

Service providers are expected to play an increasingly central role in the mobile market and their relationship with the traditional mobile network operators (MNOs) is starting to change. The dilemma faced by over-the-top service-providers (OTTs) is now whether to enter into a service level agreement with the MNOs (in the same spirit of mobile virtual network operator agreements) or to invest in deploying their own network infrastructure to serve their demand. The purpose of this paper is to study the factors shaping the agreements between OTTs and MNOs and how these factors impact network planning decisions. To this end, we build a synthetic model of cellular network deployment that explores how traditional mobile operators and OTTs compete in deploying new infrastructure. Using our model in conjunction with real-world data, we find that service-driven networks are heavily influenced by regulatory decisions, and that cost structures and demand characteristics play non-marginal roles in the definition of service-driven networks.

The proliferation of smart phones increases the demand for better Quality of Services (QoS) in mobile Internet. User's expectation causes the traditional design of mobile and wireless networks is not capable of keeping up with the changes from voice-centric to multimedia oriented services. Moreover, the mobile hosts require a certain protocol, such as mobile Internet Protocol (IP), that allows them to change their location and maintain data rate. It is important to note that mobile IP comes with handoff and routing issues that impose heavy load on home agent, which results in wasting resources. These issues and problems can be tackled and solved by using a dynamic and flexible architecture such as software-defined networking (SDN). SDN has become a common architecture to decouple conventional network architecture into control and data plane resulting in a direct programmable network control regardless the applications and network services used. In SDN architecture, a software-based controller is u...

Mobile crowdsensing is a new paradigm, sharing sensing data collected by mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. As mobile devices are usually connected by an opportunistic network for data transfer, it is hard to acknowledge the contribution of each mobile user in network forwarding and find a sustainable incentive mechanism. In this article, we propose a software defined opportunistic network scheme for mobile crowdsensing. We design a centralized control structure to manage the opportunistic network and mobile crowdsensing. By the centralized structure, we also design an incentive mechanism for data forwarding and collection in a software defined opportunistic network and solve the optimal decision of mobile devices and the sensing service provider. From the extensive simulation results, our incentive mechanism performs better than original solutions.

Network slicing for 5G provides Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) for different use cases, allowing network operators to build multiple virtual networks on a shared infrastructure. With network slicing, service providers can deploy their applications and services flexibly and quickly to accommodate diverse services' specific requirements. As an emerging technology with a number of advantages, network slicing has raised many issues for the industry and academia alike. Here, the authors discuss this technology's background and propose a framework. They also discuss remaining challenges and future research directions. This publication was made possible by the NPRP award (NPRP 8-634-1-131) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation), Huawei Technologies, and the China Scholarship Council (201506270075). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. Scopus

Mobility is the characteristics of mobile communication that makes it irresistible by all and sundry. The whole world is now engaging in wireless communication as it provides users' ability to communicate on-the-go. This is achieved by transferring users from a radio network to another. This process is called handover. Handover occurs either by cell crossing or by deterioration in signal quality of the current channel. The continuation of an active call is a critical characteristic in cellular systems. Brief overview of handover, handover type, commonly used handover parameters, some methods employed in the literature and we present the convergent point for furtherance in the area of mobile wireless communication Handover.

Mobile data traffic has been growing exponentially over the past few years. A report from Cisco shows that the mobile data traffic in 2014 grew 69 percent and was nearly 30 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000 [item 1) in the Appendix]. One of the primary contributors to the explosive mobile traffic growth is the rapid proliferation of mobile social applications running on multimedia mobile devices (particularly smartphones). These sharp increases in mobile traffic (particularly from mobile social applications) are projected to continue in the foreseeable future. As mobile networks by and large are designed and deployed to meet people’s social needs, people’s behaviors and interactions in the social domain will shape their ways to access mobile services. Therefore, there is an urgent need to integrate social effects into the design of mobile networks.

Traffic volumes in mobile networks are rising and end-user needs are rapidly changing. Mobile network operators need more flexibility, lower network operating costs, faster service roll-out cycles, and new revenue sources. The 5th Generation (5G) and future networks aim to deliver ultra-fast and ultra-reliable network access capable of supporting the anticipated surge in data traffic and connected nodes in years to come. Several technologies have been developed to meet these emergent demands of future mobile networks, among these are software defined networking, network function virtualization, and cloud computing. In this paper, we discuss the security challenges these new technologies are prone to in the context of the new telecommunication paradigm. We present a multi-tier component-based security architecture to address these challenges and secure 5G software defined mobile network (SDMN), by handling security at different levels to protect the network and its users. The proposed architecture contains five components, i.e., secure communication, policy-based communication, security information and event management, security defined monitoring, and deep packet inspection components for elevated security in the control and the data planes of SDMNs. Finally, the proposed security mechanisms are validated using test bed experiments.

Mobile communication through 5G technology is the key objective of this work. Existing research works in mobile communication through 5G technology in world submitted a great necessary development towards 5G technology in different work approaches including hardware and software. 4G technology includes several standards under a common umbrella, similar to previous generations of communication technologies. Actually 4G is good for now, however if look at it in five or ten years, 4G will obviously not be able to meet requirements for new applications coming up in the next few years. With 5G will increase the data rate, reduce the end-to-end latency, and improve coverage. These properties are particularly important for many applications related to IoT and D2D, which they are recognized as ones of the technology components of the evolving 5G architecture. The major contribution of this paper is the key provisions of mobile communication through 5G (Fifth Generation) technology of which is seen as consumer oriented. In 5G technology and mobile consumer has given top priority over others. 5G technology is to make use of mobile phones within very high bandwidth. The consumer never experienced the utmost valued technology as 5G.The 5G technologies comprise all types of sophisticated features which make 5G technology most governing technology in the vicinity of future.

In this paper, we mainly study the data transport capacity of mobile networks for mobile social services. Specifically, mobile ad hoc social networks (MAHSNs) with infrastructure support are considered the carrier networks. In MAHSNs with infrastructure support, the underlying physical networks and the upper social relationship networks interact with each other and influence the capacity of this hybrid mobile social communication carrier network together. For the physical networks, we introduce a more practical clustered model to depict the social behavior of users. We consider a virtual home point for each mobile user. For the upper social relationship networks, we propose an improved population-based model, in which we map the home points of the mobile users into the social relationship formation, to solve the social formation problem in the mobile environment. This process comprehensively considers the clustering levels of the degree of friendship and friendship distribution. Finally, from a layered networking perspective, the geographical distribution of the social traffic sessions is analyzed to derive the capacity for social-broadcast sessions of MAHSNs with infrastructure support. The results provide deep insights into the impacts of a user’ mobility pattern and social relationship formation on the capacity of MAHSNs with infrastructure support.

5G mobile systems are expected to meet different strict requirements beyond the traditional operator use cases. Effectively, to accommodate needs of new industry segments such as healthcare and manufacturing, 5G systems need to accommodate elasticity, flexibility, dynamicity, scalability, manageability, agility, and customization along with different levels of service delivery parameters according to the service requirements. This is currently possible only by running the networks on top of the same infrastructure, the technology called network function virtualization, through this sharing of the development and infrastructure costs between the different networks. In this article, we discuss the need for the deep customization of mobile networks at different granularity levels: per network, per application, per group of users, per individual users, and even per data of users. The article also assesses the potential of network slicing to provide the appropriate customization and highlights the technology challenges. Finally, a high-level architectural solution is proposed, addressing a massive multi-slice environment.

With the recent proliferation of powerful mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, data traffic on mobile networks is growing explosively. To cope with the challenges brought by the explosive growth of mobile traffic, mobile network operators tend to deploy and operate their own content distribution system within their existing network infrastructure. In this paper, we present a novel content distribution architecture called ISP-Controlled In-network Content Distribution (ICICD) to improve the content delivery performance in mobile network, which benefits from content request aggregation, hybrid cache decision mechanism, distributed load balancing, and seamless mobility support. Content request aggregation is used to decrease duplicate transmission. Hybrid cache decision mechanism enables the ICICD to cache content more efficiently. Distributed load balancing is able to ensure the overall performance and reliability of the content distribution architecture. Seamless mobility support function enables service continuity when mobile users move from one eNodeB to another. In this paper, we first give a detailed description about the key components of the ICICD architecture and then discuss a number of challenges in deploying the proposed ICICD architecture. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the performance and benefits of the proposed mobile content distribution architecture.

The increasing popularity and usage of portable smart devices have heightened the demand for higher data rates and mobility support in wireless communication networks. Many portable device users rely heavily on public transport during their trips to work, school, and other business locations. To facilitate the provision of high data rates for these commuters, the development of innovative wireless technologies is critical. Small cell networks can be a promising solution to this challenge. However, incorporating small cells in vehicular environments demands further investigation, especially for issues related to their communication architecture, interference and resource management. In this article, we present a small cell network system design that can provide seamless high data rate services to public transport users. We address the frequency allocation problem for mobile small cells and introduce time-varying frequency allocation solutions to meet the dynamic network topology and varying user traffic requirements.

The deployment of Over-The-Top (OTT) Voice over IP (VoIP) applications has been accelerated after the adoption of high-speed communications technologies (e.g.: LTE) by mobile operators. Additionally, the high incurring costs imposed on subscribers who are roaming outside their Home Public Land Mobile Network (HPLMN) has also contributed to the widespread coverage of OTT VoIP. As a result, mobile operators are witnessing a dramatic drop on their Average Revenue per User (ARPU). Current OTT VoIP apps fail to interwork with circuit switched phone calls without compromising the security requirements imposed by regulators on MNOs. In this paper we propose a method that secures a competitive edge for mobile operators over current OTT VoIP apps. It bridges the CS with PS networks and provides full control by the operator while maintaining the same security requirements. Moreover, we propose an additional feature for enabling multi-device reachability through the subscriber’s phone number (MSISDN) which is provided by the mobile operator. The method’s implementation verifies that the system has little impact on the mobile operators infrastructure. We finally conclude by providing potential business models for MNOs to increase their ARPU and outperform OTT VoIP providers

Interconnection is one of the important characteristics that define the network effect of the telecom industry. Interconnection between networks using standardized technical interfaces enables telephone calls to originate and terminate across networks spanning geographies and service providers. However, there are contentions between telecom operators on charges levied for traffic that spans across networks. Further, with technologies enabling VoIP and Internet Telephony, calls span across the Internet and the traditional telecom networks (e.g. PSTN/PLMN). Though the technical interfaces have been standardized, there are commercial issues on interconnection that needs to be addressed with regulatory guidance. This chapter provides a taxonomy of interconnection charges and discusses the different types of charges, especially the mobile termination charges and international settlement charges in detail. The chapter also highlights how the advances in technologies such as Internet Telephony, VoLTE, RCS and WebRTC continue to pose interesting regulatory questions as follows: What should be the regulatory basis for interconnection charges, especially termination charges? Should the interconnection charges regime be applicable for Internet-based communication providers as well? What are the regulatory aspects for international call charges?

In this article, we design a crowdsourcing system, CrowdMAC, where mobile devices form a local community or marketplace to share network access and transfer data for each other. CrowdMAC enables (i) mobile clients to select and exploit multiple mobile hotspots in its vicinity for data transfer and (ii) mobile hotspots to open their cellular connectivity to admit/serve delay-bounded requests from mobile users for a fee. The evaluations of CrowdMAC indicate that (i) mobile clients can tune preferred trade-offs between cost and delay through a control knob, (ii) mobile hotspots comply with all delay bounds, and (iii) the system ensures stable and efficient transfer.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT) are becoming a reality, their interconnection with mobile phone computing is increasing. Mobile phone integrated sensors offer advanced services, which when combined with Web-enabled real-world devices located near the mobile user (e.g., body area networks, radio-frequency identification tags, energy monitors, environmental sensors, etc.), have the potential of enhancing the overall user knowledge, perception and experience, encouraging more informed choices and better decisions. This paper serves as a survey of the most significant work performed in the area of mobile phone computing combined with the IoT/WoT. A selection of over 100 papers is presented, which constitute the most significant work in the field up to date, categorizing these papers into ten different domains, according to the area of application (i.e., health, sports, gaming, transportation, and agriculture), the nature of interaction (i.e., participatory sensing, eco-feedback, actuation, and control), or the communicating actors involved (i.e., things and people). Open issues and research challenges are identified, analyzed and discussed. © 2014 IEEE. 3 6 885 898 Cited By :3

This paper discusses how a mobility model can be used jointly with a mobile activity trace and evolutionary computation to reduce the signaling load related to mobility management, an important and fundamental task in any public land mobile network. For this purpose, a mobility model is used to determine the most probable locations of each mobile subscriber, and this information, in turn, is used to assign paging areas. This paging strategy is evaluated by taking into account different probability thresholds and time-delay constraints, and in a multiobjective way. Thus, we study the whole objective space of the problem, ensure the results that are not dependent on the configuration of registration areas used in the analysis, and take into account the signaling traffic of both paging and location updates (in contrast to other published works, in which only the reduction in the paging load is considered). The feasibility of this paging scheme is evaluated by means of a performance analysis, in which it is compared with other paging schemes widely used in the recent literature. Results show that this paging strategy can reduce the blanket paging load by an average of $\sim 56.73$ %. Furthermore, the performance analysis also shows that using evolutionary computation jointly with a paging procedure based on a mobility model is a very useful strategy for managing mobility in a public land mobile network, because it allows the total signaling load obtained by blanket paging to be reduced by $\sim 67.03$ %.

The rapid growth in the energy consumption of mobile networks has become a major concern for mobile operators. Today’s mobile networks’ usage is dominated by over-the-top (OTT) applications, and operators are keen to determine the network energy consumed by these OTT applications. With a recent shift in user behavior toward a preference for instant messaging (IM) applications over conventional mobile services, operators are interested in exploring what impact OTT IM applications such as WeChat will have on the energy consumption of a network when compared with a corresponding conventional mobile service. Here, we present for the first time energy assessment models for mobile services based on real network and service measurements to address this need. Using WeChat as an OTT IM application example, our results show that WeChat consumes more network energy than conventional mobile services for both light users and heavy text users due to the network signaling energy overhead. In comparison, for heavy voice users, WeChat consumes less network energy since voice messages are first recorded and then sent in packet bursts. Our findings provide a quantitative analysis of the energy consumption of mobile services, which should be valuable for mobile operators and OTT application developers to improve the energy-efficiency of mobile applications and services.

Both the variety of communication devices and their options in connecting to the Internet are continuously increasing due to the advances in numerous attractive network applications. These trends make designing the network much more complex. Legacy network design only had to consider predefined applications using common end-point devices such as plain old telephone system. On the other hand, the current and future network, especially in the access part, is expected to be universal so as to cover not only residential users, but also mobile users, and the huge number Internet of Things devices for the sake of cost efficiency. The key issue is the difficulty of designing a complex network that is also extremely energy efficient, particularly the future access system. Although many studies have attempted to improve the bandwidth utilization or energy efficiency in multiple-wavelength systems, little is known about how it will be impacted by the divergence among these multiple concrete services. In order to solve this energy issue, we propose a service multiplexing method with a profile-based network architecture, where each device declares its traffic profile. Our concept provides the feasible and practical control of complex network. It differs markedly from the methods that control the traffic at the packet or session level as it is easy to apply in actual networks.

Display Omitted We present a directory based framework for incentives management of mobile device resources in ad-hoc mobile cloud environment.We measure the incentives in energy consumption and energy saved not in Monterey bills.We equalized the incentives using third party settlement of energy consumptions according to the directory valuations.We present future application and business prospects utilizing the proposed framework. Mobile cloud computing is envisioned as a promising approach to augment the computational capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-intensive mobile applications. This augmentation is generally achieved through the capabilities of stationary resources in cloud data centers. However, these resources are mostly not free and sometimes not available. Mobile devices are becoming powerful day by day and can form a self-organizing mobile ad-hoc network of nearby devices and offer their resources as on-demand services to available nodes in the network. In the ad-hoc mobile cloud, devices can move after consuming or providing services to one another. During this process, the problem of incentives arises for a node to provide service to another device (or other devices) in the network, which ultimately decreases the motivation of the mobile device to form an ad-hoc mobile cloud. To solve this problem, we propose a directory-based architecture that keeps track of the retribution and reward valuations (in terms of energy saved and consumed) for devices even after they move from one ad-hoc environment to another. From simulation results, we infer that this framework increases the motivation for mobile devices to form a self-organizing proximate mobile cloud network and to share their resources in the network.

It is expected that by the year 2020, video services will account for more than 70 percent of mobile traffic. It is worth noting that broadcasting is a mechanism that efficiently delivers the same content to many users, not only focusing on venue casting, but also distributing many other media such as software updates and breaking news. Although broadcasting services are available in LTE and LTE-A networks, new improvements are needed in some areas to handle the demands expected in the near future. In this article we review the actual situation and some of the techniques that will make the broadcast service more dynamic and scalable, meeting the demands of its evolution toward the next generation. Resource allocation techniques for broadcast/multicast services, integration with new waveforms in 5th generation mobile communications (5G), initiatives for spectrum sharing and aggregation, or the deployment of small cells placed together with the existing macro cells, are some enhancements that are examined in detail, providing directions for further development. With this evolution, 5G broadcasting will be a driver to achieve the spectral efficiency needed for the 1000 times traffic growth that is expected in upcoming years, leading to new applications in 5G networks that are specifically focused on mobile video services.

Mobile applications are becoming more and more popular with the prevalence of mobile operating systems and mobile Internet. Many of them consume services provided by the underlying infrastructure and platforms as a part of their application environmental contexts. However, application failures or downgrade in performance may be the results due to inadequate provisions of these environmental issues in the implementations of the mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable mobile applications to consume services offered by a reliable context provider with high probability in run time. We report a case study on a suite of five real-world mobile applications with 74 real faults on real mobile phones involving 50 users. The results of the case study show that our framework can significantly improve the reliability of mobile applications with respect to the failures due to buggy-context-provider faults with low slowdown and energy overheads.

Network architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications present several constraints (e.g., processor, energy storage, bandwidth, etc.) that affect the overall network performance. Cooperation strategies have been considered as a solution to address these network limitations. In the presence of unstable network infrastructures, mobile nodes cooperate with each other, forwarding data and performing other specific network functionalities. This article proposes a generalized incentive-based cooperation solution for mobile services and applications called MobiCoop. This reputation-based scheme includes an application framework for mobile applications that uses a Web service to handle all the nodes reputation and network permissions. The main goal of MobiCoop is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. The article includes a performance evaluation study of MobiCoop considering both a real scenario (using a prototype) and a simulation-based study. Results show that the proposed approach provides network connectivity independency to users with mobile apps when Internet connectivity is unavailable. Then, it is concluded that MobiCoop improved significantly the overall system performance and the service provided for a given mobile application.

The advances in mobile technologies enable us to consume or even provide services through powerful mobile devices anytime and anywhere. Services running on mobile devices within limited range can be composed to coordinate together through wireless communication technologies and perform complex tasks. However, the mobility of users and devices in mobile environment imposes high risk on the execution of the tasks. This paper targets reducing this risk by constructing a dependable service composition after considering the mobility of both service requesters and providers. It first proposes a risk model and clarifies the risk of mobile service composition; and then proposes a service composition approach by modifying the simulated annealing algorithm. Our objective is to form a service composition by selecting mobile services under the mobility model and to ensure the service composition have the best quality of service and the lowest risk. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can yield near-optimal solutions and has a nearly linear complexity with respect to a problem size.

Mobile multihop communication network is an important branch of modern mobile communication system, and is an important technical support for ubiquitous communication. The random movement of the nodes makes the networking be more flexible, but the frequently changing topology will decrease the link duration between nodes significantly, which will increase the packets loss probability and affect the network communication performance. Aiming at the problem of declining link duration caused by nomadic characteristics in mobile multihop communication network, four link duration models for possible moving states are established based on different features in real networking process in this paper, which will provide reliable criterion for the optimal routing selection. Model analysis and simulation results show that the reliable route established by the proposed model will effectively extend the link duration, and can enhance the global stability of the mobile multihop information transmission, so as to provide new option to transmission reliability improvement for the mobile communication network.

Decisive progress in 5G mobile technology, fueled by a rapid proliferation of computation- hungry and delay-sensitive services, puts economic pressure on the research community to rethink the fundamentals of underlying networking architectures. Along these lines, the first half of this article offers a first-hand tutorial on the most recent advances in content-centric networking, emerging user applications, as well as enabling system architectures. We establish that while significant progress has been made along the individual vectors of communications, caching, and computing, together with some promising steps in proposing hybrid functionalities, the ultimate synergy behind a fully integrated solution is not nearly well understood. Against this background, the second half of this work carefully brings into perspective additional important factors, such as user mobility patterns, aggressive application requirements, and associated operator deployment capabilities, to conduct comprehensive system-level analysis. Furthermore, supported by a full-fledged practical trial on a live cellular network, our systematic findings reveal the most dominant factors in converged 5G-grade communications, caching, and computing layouts, as well as indicate the natural optimization points for system operators to leverage the maximum available benefits.

With the remarkable progressions in network communications and modern day technology, Mobile IP became very significant as people nowadays have mobile devices with them. If one network goes down, the other connected networks are affected. However, Mobile IP makes this problem practically non-existing. Wherever the user’s location is with his/her mobile device, a unique IP address of its own exists consistent with their device. Mobile IPv6 advanced features compared to MIPv4 are optimized to reduce packet loss. Herein, issues on security threats alleviates in the mobility of wireless networks. This paper focuses on MIPv6 mobility support by proposing enhanced methodologies in providing secure communication.

The widespread use and increasing capabilities of mobiles devices are making them a viable platform for offering mobile services. However, the increasing resource demands of mobile services and the inherent constraints of mobile devices limit the quality and type of functionality that can be offered, preventing mobile devices from exploiting their full potential as reliable service providers. Computation offloading offers mobile devices the opportunity to transfer resource-intensive computations to more resourcefulcomputing infrastructures. We present a framework for cloud-assisted mobile service provisioning to assist mobile devices in delivering reliable services. The framework supports dynamic offloading based on the resource status of mobile systems and current network conditions, while satisfying the user-defined energy constraints. It also enables the mobile provider to delegate the cloud infrastructure to forward the service response directly to the user when no further processing is required by the provider. Performance evaluation shows up to 6x latency improvement for computation-intensive services that do not require large data transfer. Experiments show that the operation of the cloud-assisted service provisioning framework does not pose significant overhead on mobile resources, yet it offers robust and efficient computation offloading.

With the emerging demands for local area services, mobile device-to-device (D2D) communications is conceived as a vital component for next-generation wireless networks to improve spectral reuse, to bring hop gains, and to enhance system capacity. In mobile D2D networks, energy-efficient probing schemes are vital to prolonging the limited battery life of mobile devices. Current solutions mainly focus on optimizing the probing interval during contacts by assumption of exponential distributed contact. However, studies in the area of network science have shown that the contact interval follows a power-law distribution, which indicates that the current solutions are not optimal while, on the other hand, dramatically increasing the difficulty of analyzing this problem. In this paper, we propose a network science approach for adaptive wakeup schedule based on power-law distributed contacts. Our approach requires nodes to stay asleep when a contact is unlikely to happen and to wake up only when the possibility that it successfully contacts another node is relatively high. By predicting node contacts in the future based on network science, our approach significantly reduces energy consumption without degrading the performance of opportunistic networks. Extensive simulations with real-life human and vehicular traces demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach. The results show that our scheme saves 30% in energy while keeping the same performance in most scenarios, and it enhances the performance in terms of average delivery ratio and delivery delay by over 15%, compared with the existing best wakeup techniques, without considering network science.

The concept of NFV appears to be a promising direction to save cellular network service providers from endlessly increasing capital investment, given the fast evolving mobile broadband communication techniques and unprecedented consumer demand for quality of service and quality of experience in mobile access. Meanwhile, given the deployment of NFV, the virtualized network functions and the physical hardware resources are still vulnerable to natural disasters and malicious attacks. We present in this article the first framework for reliability evaluation of NFV deployment and specific algorithms to efficiently determine the key set of physical or logical nodes there.

Recently, mobile devices with multiple network interfaces are not only being used in the daily life but also across the entire industry in diverse ways and in many different sectors, including medical, health, education, business, and entertainment. Especially, analyzing the mobile usage patterns of users, there's been an increasing number of services that provide diverse types of content on an Internet-based environment, including video conferencing and VOD streaming services. For these kinds of services, due to the limitations imposed by the client/server architecture which involves going by a base station, the need for P2P is currently being emphasized, which allows direct communication between mobile devices. In order to improve the stability of mobile P2P services, however, there are challenges to overcome, including constraints of wireless communication (such as irregular bandwidth and frequent interrupts in the connection) as well as limitations of the mobile devices themselves (such as limited CPU and battery capabilities), which are classical mobile computing problems. Accordingly, this paper suggests a peer management policy for mobile P2P environments with high degrees of mobility which is designed to increase the efficiency of data transmission by taking sufficiently into account network characteristics and energy efficiency of mobile devices.