Overall Requirements for Global Information ... - Springer Link

Wireless Pers Commun (2009) 49:311–319 DOI 10.1007/s11277-009-9686-3

Overall Requirements for Global Information Multimedia Communication Village 10th Strategic Workshop Antonio Cimmino · Pasquale Donadio

Published online: 17 March 2009 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2009

Abstract The foundations for the definition of the network of the future should be based on a correct user and community characterizations to minimize the fragmentation of the experiences during the global interactions with information communication infrastructures. This paper describes some of the complex objectives and main challenges that telecommunication solution and services have to deal with in order to respect both specific requirements of global user interactions, habits and personalization, and framework requirements about green environments. Keywords User identity · Wireless communications · Network evolution · Smart environments domotics · Access networks · WiMax

1 Introduction In the next few years, thanks to new deployments of wireless and fiber optic technologies, the Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) shall be largely diffused and deployed closer to premises of end users thus reaching more and more user communities by overcoming the costs and the geographic barriers of traditional technologies. This trend, started initially with mainly sub-optimal proprietary solutions of RF or optical technologies, has driven standardization bodies to work on the introduction of new open standards like Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN-IEEE 802.15) family [1] and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (Wi-Max-IEEE 802.16) [2]. Today Internet together with large research networks, National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) [3] and networks of private companies realize connectivity at city, nation and continent level transforming the narrow concept A. Cimmino (B) Alcatel-Lucent Italy - Technology Programs and Innovations, Salerno, Italy e-mail: [email protected] P. Donadio Alcatel-Lucent Italy - Optics Group R&D, Telecommunication Management Networks, Salerno, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

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A. Cimmino, P. Donadio

of village in global worldwide concept. Nevertheless, both the research and governmental communities do not have to forget that there are many geographic areas still having digital divide problems. The study of new complex user interactions with smart ICT access environment should be taken into account for a correct user modeling and characterization. This paper describes relevant aspects of the networks that the user will face out in next future and a possible way to enhance his/her experience. In order to give an answer to the requirements about environment and green technologies, a specific focus is made on possible impacts on the products. The paper is organized as follow: Sect. 2 describes the user communities and various domains that networks identify, Sect. 3 describes the requirements and needs of the users, Sect. 4 gives an overview of network evolution and smart environments, Sect. 5 proposes key technologies to enhance the user experience, and Sect. 6 takes into account requirements about eco sustainability and provides the conclusions.

2 Network Domains and User Communities Despite almost worldwide availability of the net the path to have realized a global multimedia village is complex. This is due to the fact that many physical and logical network infrastructures have been installed to correctly serve various administrative domains requiring different regulations and security and access policies compared to the Internet. There are also various virtual-network standard deployments to allow subscriber or employees to reach their corporate serving network environments for mobile back-office or tele-working purposes. The 3G/2G mobile networks are good examples of user roaming around and always linked to the home network of the mobile operator providing the access. The mobile networks have proposed since years consolidated embedded policies for user roaming in mobile access environments. We can group in three main areas of logical networks, domains, as depicted by the next figure: In particular: 2.1 Scientific and Research World Comprising large national and continental networks dedicated to the interconnections and services for communities of researchers. The network infrastructure (services, connectivity, and nodes) often is dedicated to this community. 2.2 Virtual Private Networks Identified by thousands of private network domain serving employees of industries or government. The network is heterogeneous encompassing both private infrastructures for large corporations and leased infrastructures from providers. 2.3 Public Internet It is a “network of networks” that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies. Normally, only the ISP providers administrate only the access.

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From the point of view of network surfing, within a single domain (internet, VPN, research) the user experience is not affected so much. Probably additional access control procedures will be required on-net depending on the availability of sub-networks and services within the same domain. A degradation of the user experience will take place when the user need to inter-work with these domains having already accessed one them. Probably it is needed to change the concept of user and subscriber and eventually to have an “user centric” approach improving the access aware or domain aware behavior. Password manager and other proxy tools are already available in the browsers for service access purposes whilst corporate proxy or firewall do not. Although many research works [4] and standardization exists [5] there is currently no user centric electronic identity certified in the net domains.

3 Characterization of the User Communities As previously discussed one of the difficulty is to make a model of the user belonging to the identified communities. In order to determine clear technical target requirements for a global multimedia village, setting also out realistic expectations in the market place, it would be relevant to identify and describe the network domains and secure networking rules an thus to identify user needs as regards services and personalization. The interaction models human-networks should be based on the roles that the user will endorse and his/her identity, habits and preferences intra and inter communities. This should also be sustainable because the technology and the networks will evolve with new standards and new regulation for the market. The success of TCP-IP deals with the fact that network layers have been always based on it or targeting it. The user centric approach is taking off with several difficulties because the electronic user identity is not yet accepted globally. 3.1 What the User Wants? The user would like to achieve a blending of all communications needs (i.e., voicemail, email, address books, collaborative work, tele-presence, virtual space) accessing anytime, anywhere. The community need to have the ability to use preferred device and ability to set the availability and privacy settings per location and based on the time of the day. Personalized content and personal media sharing is also an emerging aspect of the future networks. In order to give a structured or layered approach the user would be characterized and personalized from the point of view of: • • •

The service needs like requirements related to the 3play, collaboration, control and automations and tele-presence; Human behavior and personal habits like, mobility, professional, and social roles, identity and alias, personal safety, lifestyle, health care requirements, and fitness needs; and The interactions with surrounding ICT smart environments like domotics@home, domotics@works, domotic@life (intelligence), Eco sustainability constraints.

It is, thus, very important and urgent to take into account that the human shall interact with more complex heterogeneous access environments and depending upon the roles are endorsed (i.e., end-user, administrator, operators, member of business, or research community, private citizen, house owner) the interaction should be based on the user identity instead on subscription identity.

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Fig. 1 Main areas of logical networks

4 Network Evolution and Smart Environments The desire to create smart environments has existed for decades, and recent advances in such areas as domotic, e_health, building / house automations and triple play (internet, TV, and voice) applications with wireless and sensor networking now allows this dream to become a reality. A smart environment is a small world where all kinds of smart devices are continuously working to make inhabitants’ lives more comfortable. A definition of smart or intelligent is the ability to autonomously acquire and apply knowledge, while environment refers to our surroundings. We therefore define a smart environment as one that is able to acquire and apply knowledge about an environment and also to adapt to its inhabitants in order to improve their experience in that environment. A schema of smart environments is presented in next Fig. 2. The type of experience that individuals wish from their environment varies with the individual and the type of environment. They may wish the environment to ensure the safety of its inhabitants; they may want to reduce the cost of maintaining the environment, or they may want to automate tasks that are typically performed in the environment. Researchers have recently assembled related conferences and workshops, including the last IST2006 in

Fig. 2 A schema of smart environments

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Fig. 3 The consumer gadget “logo”

Helsinki, where one of best Information Society practices in Finland winning the award was the “Consumer Gadget” a mobile application able to decode information of bar code captured by the cam of a mobile terminal (Fig. 3). Reflecting the increased interest in smart environments, research labs in academia and industry are picking up the theme and creating environments with their own individual spin and market appeal. The Georgia Tech Aware Home, the Adaptive House at the University of Colorado at Boulder, INRIA, and the University of Texas at Arlington are involved in futuristic smart environments definitions. MIT, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego, Ambiente, Nissan, and Intel have designed other types of smart environments, including smart offices, classrooms, and cars [6–8]. Connected homes with device communication capability have become the focus of big companies. Still other groups have focused on smart environments to assist individuals with health challenges. These projects include the Gloucester Smart Home, the Edinvar Assisted Interactive Dwelling House, and the Intel Proactive Health project [9–11]. World Wide Research Forum (WWRF) [12] predicts that 7 trillion wireless devices serving 7 billion people by 2017 (c. 1,000 devices per person) therefore, the complexity of the networks on the access and border shall be enhanced and locally within the Local Area Networks, Personal Area Networks and Body Area Networks more smart functionalities shall be encompassed and potentially there will be an impact on the Quality of the user experience.1 The increasing (Fig. 4) of innovation is progressing together with the differentiation of services therefore this progress will also require more functionalities from the networks that shall need to reduce or remove its roadblock and barriers that traditional ICT offers. Of course this my lead to new business model for the actors involved.

5 User Identities and Personalization The user profile is also seen as an enabler of the interaction and preferences of the user versus surrounding ICT and smart environments having its own access network. The profile dedicated for examples to the 3rd party services could also host information to interact with these other environments. In particular, if we consider the access environment of health care and domotics (automation and controls of house or office), these are characterized by crescent level of embedded intelligence and security control functionalities (Fig. 5). Sessions can be initiated from these environments and terminated for example to the users (alarms, push info, location-based info, security and news info, environment guidance). The user profile could include flags, identifiers, or black lists for allowances and data/device formats requirements. The results would be an enhancement of the user experience that will be also less fragmented 1 Depending upon his/her role the user may be end user or administrative user. Also for the second case it is

expected that the user experience for the administration will be impacted.

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Fig. 4 New services require more from the network

Fig. 5 Interaction with other environments

in such a highly automated environment. In addition, the user profile will be a key factor for the convergence of other environments with standard telecommunication environments (data, voice, broadcasting, and Personal Networks). The above Fig. 5 shows an example where a user is immersed in a surrounding ICT environment represented by local and personal access networks. Inside this environment we have depicted in this example three relevant infrastructures: 3play (voice, data, broadcast), domotics and e_health. These infrastructures today and in the next future will contain distributed intelligence that will yield an enhancement of traditional, session based, user interactions. Therefore, in addition to the hypothesis of using the user profile for handling the Personal Network interactions, there may be the needs to involve the user profile for other environments that for user safety and security reasons will need to communicate with users. Today the standardization and industrialization of e_health, 3Play (telcos) and domotics is pro-

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gressing with different paths although all based on ICT. It is important to define a kind of convergence of all the access environments around the PN users. The user profile should also play a key role, as electronic identity embedded in the device, towards these new processes and to enforce the role of service providers in overall. Investigating the value proposition of the solutions being proposed carries out the identification of business opportunities. According to [13,14] there are many different roles for different players and of course combinations. Future business models will even increase the flexibility of roles and actors and the borders will blur. User profiles [15] can be seen as a supporting enabler directly or indirectly to: • • • •

• •

Mobile operators to get better ability to service, content provision and other management features based on user profile data; Providers to integrate different services and to offer them as one simple package to users based on user profile and other user related information. The provider is also a possible stakeholder for management and storage of user profiles; Service providers to acting as a personalization provider (PeP) working in collaboration with the relevant IdPs to define unique mobile value-added services [13,14]; Identity providers to be able to access the user profile for relevant data. Identity provider can act as a digital representative predicting the needs of a user, finding the relevant services, exchanging user information based upon the user’s policies and making the service value-added before presenting it to the user; Device manufacturers and content providers to be able to offer independent terminal based services from networking to applications and client software based on user profile data; and Content providers to get better ability to adapt content to user requirements depending on terminal, location, and user preferences.

6 Eco Sustainability Aspects and Conclusions As sustainability principles become more entrenched in societal and industrial consciousness, network of the future and smart environments will be required to meet socio-economic interests acceptability by concurrently reducing cumulative impacts and increasing the global welfare. Those technologies that can be modified or designed to meet global multimedia village requirements will provide long-term environmental sustainability, have economic functionality through the creation of wealth, and fulfill existing and future social and cultural drivers that can be grouped as below: • • • • • •

Global citizenship demands responsibility and accountability; Customers are requesting energy efficient products with eco sustainable behaviors; Regulators are promulgating energy management laws; Governments are mandating green procurement rules; Investors are scrutinizing their investments and choosing companies that employ sustainable practices and produce energy efficient products; and World leaders and international organizations (e.g., United Nations) are promoting climate change improvement initiatives that incorporate energy conservation practices and renewable energy resources.

Therefore an overall lifecycle of products for the network of the future, as the global village is seen, could be conceived as in Fig. 6 including the requirements for the environment and

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Fig. 6 Eco sustainability lifecycle for global multimedia villages

the specifications for the design have to encompass functionalities, embedded in the software, firmware and hardware, allowing to monitoring, controlling and reducing the power consumption, and thus, yielding the duplex objective of reducing the carbon emission and reducing the operating costs for the providers of ICT services. Global Information Multimedia Communication Village is to seeking to exploit our strengths, paradigms and knowledge of advanced networks and smart environment diffusion into a first generation series of commercial technology opportunities. Adopting user identities and personalization strategies, such as interoperable user identities, or standard user profile management, remain opportunities for success. Acknowledgements This work has been partially sponsored by the EU-funded Magnet beyond project. The authors thank and acknowledge a lot of the people involved in the Magnet Beyond project who have contributed considerably to the work described here as well as the alcatel-lucent community working on dataGrids [16].

References 1. Wireless Personal Area Networks (http://www.ieee802.org/15/). 2. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (http://www.wimaxforum.org/news/downloads/ WiMAXWhitepaper.pdf). 3. National Research and Education Network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_research_and_ education_network). 4. Mobile Worker Support Environments (http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/MOSAIC). 5. Trans-European Research Application Domains (http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/ enw31/moeller.html). 6. Adaptive House (http://www.cs.colorado.edu/mozer/nnh). 7. Agent-based Intelligent Reactive Environments (AIRE) (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/aire). 8. Changing Places/House_n (http://architecture.mit.edu//house_n). 9. Intel Proactive Health (http://www.intel.com/research/prohealth). 10. Microsoft Easy Living (http://research.microsoft.com/easyliving). 11. Stanford Interactive Workspaces (http://iwork.stanford.edu). 12. World Wide Research Forum (http://www.wireless-world-research.org). 13. FP6 Magnet beyond D1.5.4 (http://www.ist-magnet.org/). 14. Virtual Identity Framework for Telecom Infrastructures Amardeo Sarma · Alfredo Matos · João Girão · Rui L. Aguiar Published online: 29 February 2008 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2008. 15. FP6 Daidalos (http://www.ist-daidalos.org/). 16. Identity Management comes on Age (http://uk.sun.com/sunnews/events/2007/mar/revolution/sunlive07/ presentations/pdf/tme_1_sunlive07-alcatel_lucent.pdf).

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Author Biographies Antonio Cimmino Graduated in electronic engineering at the University of Naples (Italy) on 1985 in software modeling (HDL) and simulation of digital circuits. From 1985 to 1987 was teacher at the Italian AIR force in telecommunications and air-navigation systems. In 1987 he joined Ansaldo Trasporti in Naples as digital designer of DC/AC converters for rail transportation applications and LAN manager. In 1991 he joined Alcatel Italia, working in the mobile radio research department, primarily involved in R&D activities for RACE-II mobile and participating to Mobile Broadband System (MBS/60GHz), Monet projects. and standardization activity for ETSI RES-10 HyperLan. In 1994 joined the switching software engineering dept. in Alcatel Antwerp for participating in design and requirement management for call handling and supplementary services for Belgium, Australia and Italy markets. In 2000 participated in the UMTS task force for business development and tendering with mobile operators involved in 3G deployments. Since 2003 he has been involved in innovation and technology activities for preparation and co-ordination of national and European research projects (FP5-OBANET, FP6-WEIRD, FP6-Onelab, FP6-Nobel 2, FP6-Magnet Beyond). Currently he is involved in the FP7 program and technically responsible for the innovations related to e_health, eco sustainability, wireless broadband and telecommunication management architectures.

Pasquale Donadio obtained the computer and automation engineering degree from the “University of Naples Federico II” in 1999. He spent his thesis researching on modeling and simulation of innovative multimedia languages based on XML. His first employment was at IPM, a telecommunication factory near Naples, where he worked at the design of Internet security systems based on smartcards. In 2000 he joined the Alcatel Italia OND and worked on Craft Terminal design and development, first, as top-level designer and actually as software architect. Since 1999, he has been continuing the research activity as member of Security Lab Research Group, applying a part-time collaboration with the “Department of Informatics and Systems” of “University of Naples Federico II” and “Department of Computer Science” of Cleveland State University. Currently, his research interests are the design of Grid-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for network management and control. He also participated to many conferences and symposium, presenting his research in international environments. He also became an ALTA member.

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