A new dimension of the digital divide: Exploring the relationship between broadband connection,smartphone use and communication competence

The study explores group differences in demographic characteristics; Internet usage (device ownership, Internet availability, and frequency of weekly Internet use); and communication competence (instrumental, creative, and networking skills) between people who have and who do not have wired and/or wireless broadband connections and smartphones. The results of the one-way ANOVA and Scheffe’s post-hoc comparisons demonstrate significant differences in groups with different network connection types across demographic lines, different levels of Internet usage, and different communication competences. The results of the multinomial regression show significant differences across the variables between wired-only users and wired and smartphone users as well as between wired-only users and wired, wireless, and smartphone users. However, group differences between wired and smartphone users and wired, wireless, and smartphone users are significant only in device ownership and creative skill. We concluded that smartphone use was likely to aggravate the gaps of demographics, access, and skills in the seamlessly connected media environment. Meanwhile, access gap made the most impact on information, communication, leisure/entertainment, and financial management activities online, followed by skill and demographic gaps. The findings imply that access and skill gaps could be higher barriers to the active engagement in diverse online activities and consequently create an overlapping effect on the established divide.     

Recognizing and characterizing dynamics of cellular devices in cellular data network through massive data analysis

The user clients for accessing Internet are increasingly shifting from desktop computers to cellular devices. To be competitive in the rapidly changing market, operators, Internet service providers and application developers are required to have the capability of recognizing the models of cellular devices and understanding the traffic dynamics of cellular data network. In this paper, we propose a novel Jaccard measurement‐based method to recognize cellular device models from network traffic data. This method is implemented as a scalable paralleled MapReduce program and achieves a high accuracy, 91.5%, in the evaluation with 2.9 billion traffic records collected from the real network. Based on the recognition results, we conduct a comprehensive study of three characteristics of network traffic from device model perspective, the network access time, the traffic volume, and the diurnal patterns. The analysis results show that the distribution of network access time can be modeled by a two‐component Gaussian mixture model, and the distribution of traffic volumes is highly skewed and follows the power law. In addition, seven distinct diurnal patterns of cellular device usage are identified by applying unsupervised clustering algorithm on the collected massive traffic data. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

北向接口业务开通功能的设计与实现

近几年,运营商越来越多的使用第3方网管对不同厂商设备进行统一业务开通,而第3方网管和设备EMS之间一般使用北向接口并采用TL1协议。为了满足需求,在研究北向接口中业务开通接口(I1)的基础上,结合现有设备提出了业务自动开通功能的整体设计框架、具体模块划分,并逐个论述各个模块的设计与实现的方式。本文采用多线程的管理方式进行命令的分派,实现多网元间预配置数据的并行处理;采用ONU授权和业务配置分开的管理方式便于ONU在线和离线时配置的下发。最后使用Se-cureCRT6.0进行仿真测试,仿真结果表明该方案能够按照运营商的TL1标准进行业务开通,适合现网的无源光网络接入系统。     

Device Personalisation — Where Content Meets Device

The explosive growth of the Internet has come with increasing diversity and heterogeneity in terms of access device, device capability, network access method, bandwidth, and user preferences. Most Internet services and World Wide Web content has been designed with desktop computers in mind, and often contains rich media, such as images, audio, and video. In many cases this content is not suitable for the new (often mobile) client devices because of their limitations in terms of screen size, memory, media support, connection speed, etc. These shortcomings have prompted the need to adapt the services and content of the Internet. This is broadly known as content negotiation and requires consideration of the client device's capabilities and characteristics (both hardware and software), the connection type and speed/bandwidth, and the user's preferences.     

FLIP: A Flexible Interconnection Protocol for Heterogeneous Internetworking

This paper describes the Flexible Interconnection Protocol, or FLIP, whose main goal is to allow interconnection of heterogeneous devices with varying power, processing, and communication capabilities, ranging from simple sensors to more powerful computing devices such as laptops and desktops. The vision is that FLIP will be used to interconnect such devices forming clouds in the farthest branches/leaves of the Internet, while still providing connectivity with the existing IP-based Internet infrastructure. Through its flexible, customizable headers FLIP integrates just the functions required by a given application and that can be handled by the underlying device. Simple devices like sensors will benefit from incurring close to optimal overhead saving not only bandwidth, but, more importantly, energy. More sophisticated devices in the cloud can be responsible for implementing more complex functions like reliable/ordered data delivery, communication with other device clouds and with the IP infrastructure.FLIP is designed to provide a basic substrate on which to build network- and transport-level functionality. In heterogeneous environments, FLIP allows devices with varying capabilities to coexist and interoperate under the same network infrastructure. We present the basic design of FLIP and describe its implementation under Linux. We also report on FLIP's performance when providing IPv4 and IPv6 as well as transport-layer functionality a la TCP and UDP. We show FLIP's energy efficiency in different sensor network scenarios. For example, we use FLIP to implement the directed diffusion communication paradigm and obtain an improvement of 50% in energy savings over an existing directed diffusion implementation. Finally, we showcase FLIP's flexibility by demonstrating its ability to incorporate new protocol functions seamlessly. In particular, we add data aggregation functionality onto FLIP and show that it significantly increases the system's energy efficiency.     

The momentum behind LTE adoption

In the world of telecommunications, people today are more connected and more mobile than ever. We have more devices and more ways to stay in touch with one another. The Internet and wireline worlds are experiencing a rapid convergence of IP video, audio, and data into completely new applications. Users want that same on-demand access and Internet, multimedia experience, and content anywhere from any device.     

Digital device manuals for the management of ConnectedSpaces

An increasing number of devices that can be monitored and controlled via the Internet have begun to appear in the commercial domain. Health care devices, such as heart rate monitors and dialysis machines, home and other security devices, and climate control devices, are a few of the device types that are increasingly becoming connectable to the Internet. When many such devices come together we say they form a ConnectedSpace. Many nonfunctional behavioral constraints, such as those related to safety, security, privacy, and fault tolerance, may be imposed on a ConnectedSpace. These constraints may be monitored and enforced by a centralized or distributed management algorithm. Various approaches may be used for enforcing the constraints. Digital device manuals are envisioned to capture the generic information required by the different approaches to monitor and enforce the constraints.     

Choosing a wrong mobile communication price plan: An empirical analysis of predictors of the degree of tariff misfit among flat rate subscribers in Germany

Worldwide, more and more users of mobile communication services (MCS) are in tariffs which decouple the level of customer usage of one or several MCS (voice calls, Internet access, SMS) from the fixed monthly charge of mobile network operators (MNOs). However, consumers may inappropriately subscribe to such a flat rate because other usage-dependent price schemes are available which more closely match with their MCS use patterns. Surprisingly, little research has examined how the degree of consumer tariff misfit is correlated with socio-demographic, contract-, MCS-usage- and device-related subscriber characteristics. The present paper analyzes such associations. We develop two volume-based measures of the degree of tariff misfit in a sample of 1,274 subscribers of an MNO in Germany who had switched into a “grand flat rate” which includes unlimited national call minutes, mobile Internet traffic as well as national SMS. We find that the degree of tariff misfit is significantly higher among subscribers who are older, live in West Germany, have a longer MNO tenure, have larger monthly usage volume variations of voice calls, mobile Internet and SMS and are equipped with a device which is not an Apple iPhone. Implications of the results are discussed for MNO practitioners and for future scholarly work.     

Low-Cost Identifiers for Ubiquitous Computing

Any device we want to connect to a global network, e.g. Internet, should have a unique global identifier. However, the size of this identifier can be an unacceptable overhead for devices with limited resources (sensors, toys, disposable devices, micro-robots, etc.), because conventional protocols use full addresses to transmit, process, and store the data required for routing. The usual solution for such devices is to limit the address space to 1 or 2 bytes, but this sacrifices the global unicity of the identifiers. The proposal presented in this article enables devices with limited resources to use reduced addresses that globally identify hosts. We propose the use of abbreviated addresses for routing. We have developed a new protocol named ADSR that takes advantage of these new addresses. This protocol is a modified version of DSR based on the use of abbreviated addresses. The abbreviation procedure can lead to two different nodes having the same address, which we will term collision. ADSR allows rather than avoids collisions. The foundations of this protocol, and some results of an implementation are also presented in this article.     

支持11ac的多功能家庭网关硬件方案设计

设计了一种家庭网关设备,可以实现PON（无源光网络）接入,同时提供有线上网和无线覆盖（WiFi 2.4 GHz 5.8 GHz）、电话、视频服务。用一个设备解决多个家庭设备的联网问题,而且速度较快。在周围用户较多的情况下,能够有较好地用户体验。由于此设备支持大功率WiFi11ac功能,输出功率达20 dBm,可以在2.4 GHz信号密集区域有效避开干扰,同时提供高达1.3 Gbit·s-1的连接速率,可以满足多用户大数据量传输的要求。     

Domesticating Broadband — What Consumers Really Do with Flat-Rate, Always-On and Fast Internet Access

This paper reports analysis of a range of survey, interview and usage-log data on the level of use of broadband Internet by households in the UK and Europe. It discusses the (few) discernable differences between PSTN and broadband Internet users in mid 2001. The analysis suggests that, while there are few socio-economic and demographic differences, broadband users tend to use a wider range of applications, access them more frequently and for longer. However, because most broadband users have been, on average, users of the Internet for longer than PSTN users, these effects may be to do with their Internet competencies rather than the nature of broadband Internet itself. The paper also suggests that the interaction of speed, flat rate and always-on' is a key feature of broadband and a key value model to the user. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the usage patterns of these early adopters for current and future portal, application and service investment strategy.     

CASA‐IoT: Scalable and context‐aware IoT access control supporting multiple users

The Internet of Things (IoT) supports many users and context‐aware applications controlling heterogeneous IoT devices. This differs from traditional networks, in which a single entity manages each device. Thus, new access control models must be created in order to support more responsive, scalable, secure, and autonomous management. This article presents an attribute‐based access control model, which applies conflict resolution and access delegation in a multiuser and multiapplication environment. With scalability in mind, we propose the caching of access permissions, as well as a split policy processing model in which the devices with enough computational power perform part of the processing. The proposed model was implemented as part of the ManIoT architecture an d evaluated in experiments on a testbed to demonstrate its efficiency. Results show that our model accelerates the processing of access management policies from 51% by up to 79%.     

Mobile device‐centric access point monitoring scheme for handover decision triggering in heterogeneous networks

Because of the low throughput and the high packet error rate in wireless communications, the network traffic often converges at access points (APs), which take a role of connecting wired and wireless communication interfaces, and APs are usually bottleneck points in wireless networks. In heterogeneous networks, various networks are around mobile devices. Furthermore, today's mobile devices have various wireless network capabilities. Thus, mobile devices should be able to understand network situations autonomously and use a wide range of network options in heterogeneous networks. However, since current mobile devices cannot know the connected AP's network condition, they continue to use the AP, which provides poor‐quality networks even though there are other available APs and networks nearby. To resolve the aforementioned problems, we propose MAPS , the low‐power AP monitoring scheme for handover decision triggering in heterogeneous networks. Using MAPS , a mobile device can trigger a handover decision properly through predicting the connected AP's network condition accurately without any cooperation from other devices. Furthermore, MAPS does not require any modification on existing network systems, and the mobile device can use MAPS with simple application installation. Through diverse simulations, actual experiments, and power consumption analysis, we validate that MAPS can detect the busy AP effectively and is suitable for mobile devices because of low power consumption.     

Digital access,choice and agency in remote Sarawak

Internet use and access to digital devices continues to increase even in remote regions around the world, but users do not participate equally or engage in the same practices online. This leads to inequalities in the outcomes different groups of users can generate as a result of their online practices. Drawing from recent literature on digital divides and using a theoretical framework focused on user choice and agency, we present data from a study of internet and device use in remote villages in Sarawak, a state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo. These villages lack most basic infrastructure such as paved roads or grid electricity, but some have mobile phone and mobile internet access installed under Malaysia’s Universal Service Provision. We discuss qualitative and quantitative data collected between 2015 and 2017 to point to the opportunities as well as obstacles users in remote communities encounter in their engagements with digital devices and the internet. We argue that while remote areas seem to lag behind urban areas in terms of users’ internet skills and practices, people choose to engage with these technologies in ways that are appropriate to their needs and to the local low-bandwidth environment. To enable these communities to tap into additional potential benefits of internet use, however, faster and more reliable access is a prerequisite.     

When lifestyle becomes behavior: A closer look at the situational context of mobile communication

The web is going mobile, and the scope of mobile communication is widening tremendously, thus paving the way for a wide array of new forms of mobile device use. However, not every user is necessarily all the time taking advantage of the expanded affordances of mobile devices. Texting and phoning are still the predominant services in mobile communication. Previous research has argued that different styles of mobile communication are related to different user lifestyles. Thus, a remapping and matching of the landscape of mobile communication in relation to user lifestyles seems necessary. In this paper, we take one step back and first consider the instances in which lifestyles become behavior; i.e. actual usage situations of mobile communication. We outline three empirically deduced types of mobile communication usage situations, as well as three types of mobile web usage situations, to shed light on the instant at which lifestyle becomes behavior; i.e. at which specific usage situations of mobile communication actually occur.     

An empirical study on consumer online shopping channel choice behavior in omni-channel environment

With the rapid diffusion of smart devices, retailers provide new forms of interactive communication channels, enabling their consumers to access through the mobile channel. The retailers recognize the importance of the mobile channel as an efficient sales channel and as a tool for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). However, CRM has become increasingly complex after adopting it to the mobile channel. It is imperative for retailers to understand consumer behavior in an omni-channel circumstance. Using the four-year transaction data obtained from the online home-shopping provider that expanded its online service (telephone, ARS, Internet website) onto a mobile platform, this research analyzes the consumer channel choice behavior in the perspectives of consumer sociodemographic information, consumer behavior, and corporate communication strategies. To explain channel choices in the omni-channel environment, we use multivariate probit model with sociodemographic variables, communication strategies, order hour, and product categories. Our empirical results indicate that age and gender have significant influences on channel choice behavior. Consumer fixates their inflow channel. Communication strategies such as SMS and app push alarm significantly influence consumer channel choice. Consumers using mobile channel are making purchases without time constraints, while others not. We observed that products that have characteristics of experience goods or credence goods tend to be purchased via mobile and Internet channels that provide detailed and additive information like consumer reviews. Finally, the results revealed substitution effect between most of the channels, except for the Internet and telephone. Our investigation contributes to omni-channel online shopping literature by empirically testing the choice behavior, cross-channel effects, and also by providing insights for online retailers.     

<Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">LAMA/CA</Emphasis>: A Load-Adaptive MAC Protocol for Short Packets

An efficient Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless Internet access is developed in this study. The proposed access protocol exploits the fact that very often the Internet access messages, such as HTTP download requests, are based on short packets. In addition, whenever the user is able to access to multiple overlapping base stations (e.g., in WiMAX access networks, or in 3GPP cellular networks), the proposed protocol enables the user to select the least loaded base station. Consequently, the user gets a better quality of service, while load balancing is achieved by preferring links that are less loaded over congested links. The key idea is to adjust the access probability to the load on the local link, and to use a different access protocol for short messages. Delay insensitive and long messages are transmitted using a Request To Send (RTS) and Clear To Send (CTS) mechanism, in a similar way to IEEE 802.11, over hops that are able to support this protocol type, while short and delay-sensitive messages are transmitted using another method, that offers a reduced call delivery delay, as well as better channel utilization. Whenever the message length drops below a certain threshold (evaluated in this study), the overhead of transmitting an RTS and CTS messages becomes too large. The analysis in this study shows that this threshold is load-dependent. Whenever the message length drops below this load-dependent threshold, this study proposes to use a protocol which is more efficient for short messages transmissions, such as HTTP download requests, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, and signaling messages. The proposed MAC protocol is especially suitable for 3G and beyond cellular networks. Whenever there are number of channels that can be possibly used to deliver a message, it enables to select the least loaded channel among several channels.