Regulation,investment and efficiency in the transition to next generation broadband networks: Evidence from the European Union

This article explores the impact of public policy on technological change and the development of broadband infrastructure in EU member countries. The analysis explores contradictory findings in previous empirical literature on the interplay between regulation, competition, and investment, noting the importance of the construction of indicators employed to evaluate these interactions. Furthermore, the article points out that the traditional policy model and related empirical literature treat fixed capital inputs in networks as a measure of broadband infrastructure quality. However, relatively higher capital inputs do not necessarily translate into the development of relatively higher quality broadband networks. Using broadband network performance measurements between 2007 and 2012, the article addresses this contradiction in the literature and evaluates the determinants of broadband infrastructure quality in the EU. The analysis suggests countries that have been more effective at promoting entry and competition in the provision of Internet access services have developed relatively higher quality broadband networks.     

Businesses and the need for speed: The impact of broadband speed on business presence

Despite the widespread attention devoted to broadband and its anticipated impacts, surprisingly little is known regarding the linkages between broadband provision and establishment location. This is particularly true with respect to broadband speed. Given the understudied nature of this relationship, this study estimates econometric models to examine the linkages between broadband speed and firms using Ohio as a case study. Models results indicate broadband speed is most important to agricultural and rural firms. These findings provide case study support for policy and funding initiatives designed to improve the quality of broadband infrastructure in rural locations.     

Access to broadband Internet and labour force outcomes: A case study of the Western Downs Region,Queensland

This paper examines the causal effect of household access to broadband Internet on individuals’ labour market outcomes in an Australian rural and regional context. This study uses the survey data of 391 households randomly selected from the Western Downs Region of Queensland, Australia, and employs the propensity score matching technique to make causal inferences. This study also controls selection bias issues – an aspect which has been overlooked in previous studies. This study found that the causal effect of household access to broadband Internet on individuals’ labour force outcomes is not statistically significant. This finding can add value to our knowledge of the causal relationship between broadband access and labour force participation. As the rollout of a high-speed broadband network in rural and regional Australia is currently underway, the finding can be considered a benchmark for subsequent assessment of the effects of such infrastructure development on socio-economic outcomes.     

The impact of facilities and service-based competition on internet services provision in the Canadian broadband market

A variety of studies have focused on the effect of competition in broadband markets on increasing broadband penetration rates. Few studies however have focused on the extent to which competition also results in innovation in the marketplace, as demonstrated by increased broadband speeds, and other improvements that provide value to broadband users. This paper considers the effectiveness of market competition as a means of encouraging broadband providers to offer innovative services that meet citizens’ increasing needs for affordable high quality and high speed broadband connectivity. The study focuses on the provision of broadband services in Canada, a country where consumers were early adopters of broadband and where the policy environment has encouraged competition in the broadband market from its inception. Drawing on data from the OECD and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the paper demonstrates that Canada’s regulatory regime does not appear to be sufficient to enable a competitive marketplace that results in the provision of innovative broadband services.     

Telecom sector of Pakistan: Potential,challenges and business opportunities

Pakistan has exercised major developments recently in the Telecom sector. The main focus is to extend maximum benefits to the general user in terms of having accessibility to the modern services and better quality of service as a result of competitive environment amongst the network operators. The international investors also have directly contributed towards the economy as a result of which further horizons for exploring and improving the broadband market have emerged. In this paper, we have presented the growing telecom access and statistics, investment opportunities in the sector, modern applications and the broadband developments in line with the changing orientation of the telecom industry of Pakistan.     

Predictive models to measure the impact of fiber-optic broadband speeds on local towns and communities

Internet availability and speed can impact a local community’s education, healthcare, safety, and economic development. Currently, there are few, if any, formal analyses to help communities make informed decisions on investments in internet and bandwidth expansion. This is in spite of the longstanding view posited by economic policy researchers that certain public infrastructure investments must be analyzed on a local government basis. Here, we adopt the local community focus and combine data from local, state and federal sources to develop models that predict the impacts of fiber-optic bandwidth expansion on economic factors for individual towns and communities. Our predictive analysis also demonstrates differing impacts related to town size and yields interesting outcomes related to local geographies. The rankings and comparisons derived from our predictive methodology can be used by town and state planners to holistically plan internet infrastructure development across localities. Our modeling approach can be applied to develop models specific to other towns and communities facing similar decisions regarding investments in internet speed.     

Overlay networking： applications and research challenges

Overlay networking is one of the perspective solutions to today‘s Internet challenges. At basic service level, overlay networks can serve as a supplement and enhancement of existing services, such as routing and addressing. At high application level, overlay networks can be used for applications, which are difficult to deploy in existing IP architecture with some specific reasons, e.g., they need high-level information, which is hard to obtain by underlying layers. To address the heterogeneity of today‘s Internet, overlay networks provide ways to service availability and desirable performance while retaining scalability. In contrast to changing the existing network layer, overlay networks allow bootstrapping, which is most important in the development of Internet infrastructure. Various applications of overlay networking are clarified in this paper. Research challenges including routing and searching in overlay networking are also identified.     

FB-banyans and FB-delta networks: Fault-tolerant networks for broadband packet switching

Many fast packet switches for the broadband integrated services digital network (BISDN) in the literature are based on banyan networks. Although banyan networks possess nice properties such as a simple control and a low hardware cost, they are unique-path networks. Since there is a unique path from an input to an output in a banyan network, a single component failure may disrupt services of some nodes connected to such a network. Moreover, banyan networks are also blocking networks; packets can be lost within the networks. To reduce the packet loss, buffered banyan networks can be used. In an earlier work we have proposed the addition of backward links to otherwise unidirectional banyan networks to create B-banyans (and B-delta networks). Backward links not only function as implicit buffers for blocked packets, but also provide multiple paths for each input-output connection. However, the multiple paths in B-banyans may not be disjoint. In this paper, we enhance B-banyans and B-delta networks in such a way that the resulting networks can provide disjoint multiple paths for each input-output pair. The existence of disjoint multiple paths has a significant effect on the network fault-tolerance. The new networks, called FB-banyans and FB-delta networks, are k fault-tolerant, where k is the number of backward links per switch and is less than the switch size. They are also robust to more than k faults, depending on the locations of faults. The maximal fault-tolerance is achieved when k is the switch size minus 1. The performance of the new networks is analysed and compared to that of other networks of interest. FB-banyans and FB-delta networks can be used as a switch fabric for fast packet switches to provide performance comparable to that of buffered banyan networks and good fault tolerance.     

Municipal wireless broadband: Lessons from San Francisco and Silicon Valley

In December 2005, the city of San Francisco issued a request for proposal (RFP) for a community wireless broadband network. This initiative received significant national and even international attention, largely because of San Francisco’s visibility in the high tech world, and the involvement of Google in the consortium selected to build and operate the network. However, the project died without any network being built. In the past year, several other US municipal wireless initiatives have floundered or died.     

Mobile computing and ubiquitous networking: concepts, technologies and challenges

With the rapidly increasing penetration of laptop computers, which are primarily used by mobile users to access Internet services, support of Internet services in a mobile environment become an increasing need. The opportunities emerging from these technologies give rise to new paradigms such as mobile computing and ubiquitous networking. However, there are numerous challenges such as reliability and quality of service, infrastructure costs, energy efficiency of mobile devices, among others. This paper analyzes concepts, technologies and challenges related to these paradigms. The major challenges include mobility, disconnection and scale, new information medium and new resource limitations. As a fundamental characteristics of mobile environments, the user can see the same computing environment regardless of his or her current location. The most exciting promises of mobile computing and ubiquitous networking stay an entire new class of applications and potential new massive markets combining personal computing and consumer electronics.     

Blockchain-based fog radio access networks: Architecture,key technologies,and challenges

Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) has been regarded as a promising solution to the alleviation of the ever-increasing traffic burden on current and future wireless networks, for it shifts the caching and computing resources from remote cloud to the network edge. However, it makes wireless networks more vulnerable to security attacks as well. To resolve this issue, in this article, we propose a secure yet trustless Blockchain-based F-RAN (BF-RAN), which allows a massive number of trustless devices to form a large-scale trusted cooperative network by leveraging the key features of blockchain, such as decentralization, tamper-proof, and traceability. The architecture of BF-RAN is first presented. Then, the key technologies, including access control, dynamic resource management, and network deployment are discussed. Finally, challenges and open problems in the BF-RAN are identified.     

Research advances on blockchain-as-a-service: architectures,applications and challenges

Due to the complexity of blockchain technology, it usually costs too much effort to build, maintain and monitor a blockchain system that supports a targeted application. To this end, the emerging “Blockchain as a Service” (BaaS) makes the blockchain and distributed ledgers more accessible, particularly for businesses, by reducing costs and overheads. BaaS combines the high computing power of cloud computing, the pervasiveness of IoT and the decentralization of blockchain, allowing people to build their own applications while ensuring the transparency and openness of the system. This paper surveys the research outputs of both academia and industry. First, it introduces the representative architectures of BaaS systems and then summarizes the research contributions of BaaS from the technologies for service provision, roles, container and virtualization, interfaces, customization and evaluation. The typical applications of BaaS in both academic and practical domains are also introduced. At present, the research on the blockchain is abundant, but research on BaaS is still in its infancy. Six challenges of BaaS are concluded in this paper for further study directions.     

Internet of Things offloading: Ongoing issues,opportunities, and future challenges

Internet of Things (IoT) has very remarkable advantages over customary communication technologies. However, IoT suffers from different issues, such as limited battery life, low storage capacity, and little computing capacity. For this reason, in many IoT applications and devices, we require an alternative unit to execute the tasks from the user's device and return results. In general, the problem of limited resources by transferring the computation workload to other devices/systems with better resources is addressed by offloading computation. It can be focused on improving the application, extending battery life, or expanding storage capacity. The offloading operation can be performed based on various quality of service (QoS) parameters that contain computational demands for load balancing, response time, application, energy consumption, latency, and other things. Moreover, the systematic literature review (SLR) method is used to identify, assess, and integrate findings from all relevant studies that address one or more research questions on IoT offloading and conduct a comprehensive study of empirical research on offloading techniques. However, we present a new taxonomy for them based on offloading decision mechanisms and overall architectures. Furthermore, we offer a parametric comparison for the offloading methods. As well, we present the future direction and research opportunities in IoT offloading computation. This survey will assist academics and practitioners to directly understand the progress in IoT offloading.     

物联网的特征、内涵、发展策略和挑战

本文首先论述了物联网的内涵、体系架构及其战略意义.然后,讨论和分析了物联网的市场空间、行业特征和运营商在产业链中的定位.接下来,文章分析了物联网的流量分类特征、对于网络的影响以及物联网的核心技术.最后探讨了物联网的发展策略、主要挑战及其可能的未来.     

中国农村通信的今昔与未来

中国农村通信技术经历了从人工、机电到程控的逐步而漫长的发展过程,经营体制上也经历了一系列变迁,并长期保持国营、地方国营和集体所有制等多种体制并存的局面。目前虽然农村通信已经取得了长足进步,但广大的中西部,尤其是偏远地区、山区和海岛等电信发展水平还很低,并面临各种困难。建议建立普遍服务基金,建设农村综合信息传播网,采取无线和卫星等技术,促进农村通信的快速发展。     

Adaptive coding and modulation for satellite broadband networks: From theory to practice

This paper presents the detailed design and the key system performance results of a comprehensive laboratory demonstrator for a broadband Ka‐band multi‐beam satellite system exploiting the new DVB‐S2 standard with adaptive coding and modulation (ACM). This complete demonstrator allows in‐depth verification and optimization of the ACM techniques applied to large satellite broadband networks, as well as complementing and confirming the more theoretical or simulation‐based findings published so far. It is demonstrated that few ACM configurations (in terms of modulation and coding) are able to efficiently cope with a typical Ka‐band multi‐beam satellite system with negligible capacity loss. It is also demonstrated that the exploitation of ACM thresholds with hysteresis represents the most reliable way to adapt the physical layer configuration to the spatial and time variability of the channel conditions while avoiding too many physical layer configuration changes. Simple ACM adaptation techniques, readily implementable over large‐scale networks, are shown to perform very well, fulfilling the target packet‐error rate requirements even in the presence of deep fading conditions. The impact of carrier phase noise and satellite nonlinearity has also been measured. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

面向大规模物联网的随机接入:现状、挑战与机遇

在传统通信系统中,随机接入是终端与网络之间建立无线链路的必经过程,只有在随机接入完成之后,终端与网络之间才能正常进行数据传输.聚焦大规模节点物联网,首先阐述了大规模物联网随机接入的基本特征,分析了传统授权随机接入(RA)方法对于大规模物联网应用的局限性;然后从系统模型、协议框架、算法流程、系统性能等多个角度,讨论免授权...     

Broadband and digital ‘content’ in the EU-25: Recent trends and challenges

This paper focuses on recent trends and issues in the EU-25 countries related to one key broadband application area: digital media ‘content’ applications. It draws upon recently completed research addressing current and future uses and applications of broadband in the EU-25 area.

The paper presents key findings from the BEACON project concerning the broadband content trends and issues in the EU-25 countries. First, the paper briefly considers recent literature on broadband and digital media innovations as well as the policy context in Europe, which has an important influence on framing supports for innovation in content and digital media. Next, it addresses a number of key issues that impact upon the creation of content services. These include the high cost of content production and the difficulty of forming attractive business cases given the uncertainties related to user demand, and the IPR and copyright regimes. It will also consider users’ patterns of engagement with broadband content and emerging user applications. Next, the paper discusses whether broadband is reaching a ‘tipping point’, whereby broadband access is becoming the norm and in the next five years we will see the emergence of innovative, dynamic content services. The paper considers whether recent moves by three sets of significant actors (media corporations, the advertising sector, and EC regulators) could be early signs of a tipping point in favour of the creation of and more focused support for broadband content services.     

Recent advances in Industrial Internet: insights and challenges

The Industrial Internet is a promising technology combining industrial systems with Internet connectivity to significantly improve the product efficiency and reduce production cost by cooperating with intelligent devices, in which the advanced computing, big data analysis and intelligent perception techniques have been involved. This paper comprehensively surveys the recent advances of the Industrial Internet, including reference architectures, key technologies, relative applications and future challenges. Reference architectures which have been proposed for different application scenarios and their corresponding characteristics are summarized. Key technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile edge computing, fog computing, which are classified according to different layers in the architecture, are presented to support a variety of applications in the Industrial Internet. Meanwhile, future challenges and research trends are discussed as well to promote further research of the Industrial Internet.