Ubiquitous Services Research Demonstration Day

Date & Time : 16th December 2008

Venue : BT Centre, London  Location

Address: 81 Newgate Street, London, EC1A 7AJ

Mobile VCE would like to thank BT for kindly hosting this event at its London 'BT Centre' facility

Objectives

Commercialisation of Ubiquitous Services requires the ability to flexibly deliver a wide and ever-increasing service mix to users having diverse multiple device capabilities via multiple heterogeneous networks. The work within the ‘Removing the Barriers to Commercialisation of Ubiquitous Services’ programme has identified and addressed such barriers in three critical domains: User, Network and Service/Content.

The aim of this day is to present the high level outcomes from the research program, together with the opportunity to view some hands-on proof of principle demonstrations.

The day is intentionally structured into two halves:
The morning is high level and suited to Senior Managers, Strategy & Marketing Executives from Mobile VCE's member companies and invited guests.
The afternoon sessions will provide opportunity to understand more technical detail of the research for the benefit of industry staff who require more in-depth insights.

You may register online on the Mobile VCE calendar page to attend this event:
http://www.mobilevce.com/frames.htm?calendar.php

Non-member companies who wish to send staff to this event are invited to contact the Mobile VCE office or the Industrial Chairman of the programme, Stewart Fallis of BT [stewart.fallis@bt.com]

Programme    download pdf version

  10.15 Tea and Coffee
  10.45 Welcome and Introduction to Ubiquitous Services
The full title of this programme is "Removing the Barriers to the Commercialisation of Ubiquitous Services". This refers to the fact that whilst technical and commercial advances have increasingly made access to wireless services ubiquitous, significant barriers still remain to the deployment of services that can truly exploit this potential. The barriers addressed within this programme relate to the User, the Network and the Content/Service domains.

Stewart Fallis, Industrial Chairman for the programme, will introduce the vision of Ubiquitous Services and the overall structure of the research.
Stewart Fallis, BT
  11.15 Enabling Future Services: The Research Toolbox
Mobile VCE's research is undertaken for and funded by leading companies in the global telecom industry, all of whom have different strategic objectives and different, but strong, in house R&D capabilities. Reflecting this reality, rather than seeking to create and define a new unified architecture or standard, this research programme is developing a toolbox of new and powerful capabilities from which our industrial members can select and combine with their own in-house tools in order to create their own tailored solutions, customised to their own objectives, capabilities and goals.
Walter Tuttlebee, Mobile VCE
  11.30 Scenarios for Ubiquitous Services
The industrial steering team have defined a number of specific scenarios that will outlined, which will serve to demonstrate the technological solutions to the identified barriers to the commercialisation of Ubiquitous Services.
Steve Wolak, Vodafone
  12.00 Lunch & Proof of Principle Demonstrations
Over lunch, there will b opportunity to view the proof-of-principle demonstrations that have been created during the program. These demonstrations have been selected to illustrate potential solutions to important technological challenges addressed by the program and will be related to the example scenarios.

A detailed description of these demonstrations is given below...
  Proof of Principle Demonstrations:
  
  Area 1: USER PERSPECTIVE:
  Right Service: Right Device
The stereotypical vision of a future with 'Ubiquitous Services' often involves a user with a heterogeneous mix of devices, each with varied capabilities. This demonstration identifies that as users' devices proliferate, the capabilities and modalities of multiple devices can be automatically understood and reasoned in order to provide autonomous adaptation on behalf of the user. Such capabilities will provide ease of use, without which service and device take up will be delayed.

A 'Service Context Manager' will be shown which builds on traditional service discovery mechanisms to create an understanding of devices and services which allows the service to be consumed on the 'best' device as appropriate to each individual user.
Suparna De, Surrey University
  Optimised Content Availability in Dynamic Environments
The pervasive and ubiquitous access to one's personal digital 'stuff' (content, media, etc) is a vital quality that people expect from their ubiquitous future - indeed, early adopters want this today ! This future, with many devices per user, can greatly benefit from a system to manage where personal content resides and to identify when it should be move to remain 'at the user's fingertips' as he goes through his day - ensuring, for example, that you can never inadvertently leave behind those vital tickets or documents.

A 'Personal Content Manager' will be shown which can be configured to optimise content availability. This demonstration emulates the scenario of managing & retrieving a user's content across their heterogeneous mix of devices while taking into account battery power, processing capabilities and storage capacity.
Alexnewton Alexander, Strathclyde University
  Ubiquitous Content Transfer
'Always best connected' is a term often used when discussing future mobile environments. However, with multiple devices available to a user, there is increasing use of multiple air interfaces over different technologies. When handing over from one technology to another there can be a discontinuity or a delay in the wireless access.

This demonstration examines the discontinuity where a short range and long range technology do not share the same addressing scheme - some form of translation is required in order to maintain the session.

A NEMO/MIP based solution will be shown, wherein short range addresses can be pre-allocated a global address - thereby allowing for a smooth transition, and increasing usability.
Junkang Ma, Edinburgh University
  Area 2: NETWORK PERSPECTIVE:
  Efficient & Transparent Service Interworking between Heterogeneous Network Infrastructures
Mobility, QoS and Security are three fundamentally important parameters/capabilities of communication networks. Traditionally these mechanisms have been designed and optimised separately. The result of this is that when these mechanisms are independently implemented within a network and across heterogeneous networks, the overall performance fails to deliver on the design promise.

By taking a new, unified, approach to these system requirements it has been possible to identify an approach that can deliver effective and improved performance, offering the potential to be able to provide QoS guarantees in a heterogeneous environment which may not be not fully owned or controlled by the service provider.

This approach proposed use of Enhanced Nodes (potentially a software upgrade to existing IP routers) as a replacement for Mobility Anchor Points within MobileIPv6.

The demonstration takes the form of a tool that illustrates and assists in the optimisation of deploying Enhanced Nodes in an access network.
Paul Pangalos, Kings College London
  Area 3: SERVICE/CONTENT PERSPECTIVE:
  Personalised Service & Content Provision
As the number of connected devices increases, in conjunction with an explosion of service capabilities, it is becoming increasingly impractical for service providers to prepare their content in advance, tailored specifically for every conceivable device. Already a range of companies are delivering tailored solutions to this problem, but this can tie an operator into rigid solutions.

The need for a fully flexible dynamic adaptation mechanism that allows content and services to be automatically adapted and repurposed to a user's current capabilities, i.e. device and environment capabilities and their individual preferences, in a way that allows for the rapid evolution of new formats and devices.

This demonstrration will illustrate the use of an Adaptation Management Framework (AMF) to minimize the management complexity of service and content delivery to users enabling enhanced, personalised user experiences, reduction in storage requirements for service and content and rapid service creation agnostic to users' devices.
Ning Li, Surrey University
  Afternoon: Technical Presentations
  
  14.00 The User Perspective
From the User Perspective, the research has focused on innovations to personalise service delivery to individual users and to simplify user management and control by means of automation. This has to be coupled with effective mechanisms for personal content management to allow easy retrieval of desired information while hiding from the user the configuration issues of the terminal, service and content.
John Bush, Strathclyde University
  14.30 The Network Perspective
From the Network Perspective, the key barrier to accessing Ubiquitous Services arises from the need to manage delivery of multiple services within different QoS, Security and Mobility Management environments across multiple heterogeneous networks.

This presentation will describe the approach taken to address this requirement, for access networks owned by different operators, to collaborate effectively in a co-operative manner that delivers user requirements, whilst maintaining independence, security and other essential features.
Paul Pangalos, Kings College London
  15.00 The Service/Content Perspective
From the Service/Content Perspective, the research has developed content and service adaptation strategies to suit the user’s current context, communication access and device capabilities requiring minimum involvement from content/service providers.
Klaus Moessner, Surrey University
  15.30 Q&A
  16.00 Meeting Close

 

Revised 18th November 2008 MobileVCE Home Copyright © 2010 Mobile VCE.