International audience ; The paper begins by sketching out a short history of telecom policy, pointing to the prejudicial consequences of centralization from a political perspective, as incumbent ISPs turn into network gatekeepers, fostering their commercial interests by exerting greater control over users' communications. Based on our fieldwork and qualitative interviews, the paper then moves on to describing WCN, presenting the main characteristics of these grassroots attempts at bringing about a "subversive rationalization" of the last-mile network infrastructure. This second section outlines the motivations underlying the deployment of WCN, together with their technical features and innovative, commons-based models of governance, which all strongly contrast with the dominant, commercial model for Internet access provision. The third and last section assesses the impact of WCN on telecom regulation and the new power dynamics it entails, with regard to both the private sector and the public sector. The paper concludes that current telecom regulation significantly overlooks the contribution of community networks to fostering political and socio-economic objectives associated with broadband policy and proposes a number of policy recommendations to overcome this gap.
International audience The paper begins by sketching out a short history of telecom policy, pointing to the prejudicial consequences of centralization from a political perspective, as incumbent ISPs turn into network gatekeepers, fostering their commercial interests by exerting greater control over users' communications. Based on our fieldwork and qualitative interviews, the paper then moves on to describing WCN, presenting the main characteristics of these grassroots attempts at bringing about a "subversive rationalization" of the last-mile network infrastructure. This second section outlines the motivations underlying the deployment of WCN, together with their technical features and innovative, commons-based models of governance, which all strongly contrast with the dominant, commercial model for Internet access provision. The third and last section assesses the impact of WCN on telecom regulation and the new power dynamics it entails, with regard to both the private sector and the public sector. The paper concludes that current telecom regulation significantly overlooks the contribution of community networks to fostering political and socio-economic objectives associated with broadband policy and proposes a number of policy recommendations to overcome this gap.
Economic and environmental pressures require the development of technologies that are compatible with the Earth's environment and acceptable to society. An emerging power supply option based on Nikola Tesla's concept of wireless power transmission (WPT) can be applied to transmit power over intercontinental distances with power relay satellites (PRS) [1] to access renewable energy sources at undeveloped or underutilized remote sites, and to convert solar energy in space for use on Earth on a global scale with solar power satellites (SPS) [2] that may not be achievable with known power generating systems relying on finite terrestrial energy sources. International efforts to develop key advanced technologies and adapt existing technologies, to plan and carry out supporting experiments on Earth and in space, to analyze WPT system performance for PRS and SPS applications, and to assess economic viability, compatibility with the global legal and regulatory framework, and potential societal issues, have been and are continuing at academic institutions, industry' and government agencies in Europe, Japan, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. The results of these efforts were presented in specialists' conferences, meetings of professional societies, and under the auspices of agencies of the United Nations. The expanding knowledge base is contributing to the growing acceptance of WPT applications as one of the few global power supply options that can achieve global sustainable development on a scale significant enough to meet the aspirations of the global community and ensure that the Earth will remain a planet hospitable to all forms of life. My best wishes to the attendees at the International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques. The advancements in this field are already making significant contributions to the realization of the applications of WPT for PRS and SPS to meet future global energy demands.
Spotting Opportunity today and recognizing the same is the vision of the expert. The wireless communication network regime is one such environment that offers such a platform for many working scientific, academic and engineering experts. Henceforth, "Opportunistic-network" is a recent evolution of the above said phenomena in the wireless community. They function by spontaneous cooperation & coordination giving birth to a special type network called wireless-mobile-adhoc-network (W-MAN). As said, these networks are formed instantaneously in a random manner – breaking the conventional mathematically evolved algorithms', and provided the quintessential of a network(s) that exist in neighbourhood(s) or approachable limits. Is more of situational based, exploited for specialized purpose or advantage, which mimics all the characteristic of a well evolved network. Such networks, lack an endto-end path, contact, cooperation and coordination; which is mainly opportunity based, and break or even disintegrate soon after discovery, thus the challenge lay in integration, construction and probable sustenance or even mid-way reconstruction till purpose. One can cite many realistic scenarios fitting to this situation. For example, wildlife tracking sensor networks, military networks, vehicular ad hoc networks to mention a few. To transmit information under such circumstances/scenarios researchers have proposed various efficient forwarding (single copy), replication routing and controlled based schemes. In this paper, we propose to explore, investigate and analyze most of the schemes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] and present the findings of the said scheme by consolidating critical parameters and issues and towards the end of this paper, algorithms, possible solutions to deal with such complex and dynamic situations through W-MAN scheme suggested by us.
The Indian telecommunication market is second largest in the world and is growing rapidly. The government is taking several measures such as National optical fiber network (NOFN) project, public WiFi pilot to bridge the gap of digital divide in order to provide Internet services throughout the country including under reserved regions of India. However, the available licensed spectrum might not be sufficient to fulfill the demand alone given the fact that it is a limited resource and its assignment to operators is highly regulated. Nevertheless, the unlicensed spectrum might be underutilized since it has around 31000 hotspots throughout the country. Community networks is an emerging concept in India, which plays an important role in bridging digital divide by exploiting unlicensed spectrum. The focus of this paper is to examine the availability of licensed spectrum and discuss the need of regulatory support to enable the growth of community networks in India. The paper studies the following hypotheses as the regulatory bottlenecks in the wireless expansion of Internet in India. i) Licensed spectrum is scarce ii) Low spectrum holdings of operators iii) Inadequate market concentration iv) Lack of regulatory incentives for community networks. The results confirm that competition act as a catalyst in the diffusion of Internet and also that the spectrum scarcity is relatively observed in local service areas in the telecom market. Since the diffusion of wireless networks is less in rural regions, support from regulatory bodies is primarily needed to improve it. Hence, we present few regulatory recommendations related to innovative licensing, and engagement of communities to support the growth of community network operators.
In: New media & society: an international and interdisciplinary forum for the examination of the social dynamics of media and information change, Band 10, Heft 6, S. 831-850
A significant body of research has addressed whether fixed internet use increases, decreases or supplements the ways in which people engage in residential and workplace settings, but few studies have addressed how wireless internet use in public and semi-public spaces influences social life. Ubiquitous wi-fi adds a new dimension to the debate over how the internet may influence the structure of community.Will wireless internet use facilitate greater engagement with co-located others or encourage a form of 'public privatism'? This article reports the findings of an exploratory ethnographic study of how wi-fi was used and influenced social interactions in four different settings: paid and free wi-fi cafes in Boston, MA and Seattle,WA.This study found contrasting uses for wireless internet and competing implications for community.Two types of practices, typified in the behaviors of 'true mobiles' and 'placemakers', offer divergent futures for how wireless internet use may influence social relationships.
This paper examines the impact of a community wireless mesh network established in the village of Mahavilachchiya, Sri Lanka. The "e-village" in Mahavilachchiya, created through a partnership between government agencies and a local NGO, features Sri Lanka's first wireless mesh network and has been operational since October, 2006. This paper incorporates data collected from the government run ICT agency and partner organizations, as well as observations of daily Internet use in Mahavilachchiya. Additionally, a survey on Internet use was administered to 35 students in Mahavilachchiya. The current reach of ICT in the village is examined and recommendations are made for the implementation of future e-villages.
Crowd condition monitoring concerns the crowd safety and concerns business performance metrics. The research problem to be solved is a crowd condition estimation approach to enable and support the supervision of mass events by first-responders and marketing experts, but is also targeted towards supporting social scientists, journalists, historians, public relations experts, community leaders, and political researchers. Real-time insights of the crowd condition is desired for quick reactions and historic crowd conditions measurements are desired for profound post-event crowd condition analysis. This thesis aims to provide a systematic understanding of different approaches for crowd condition estimation by relying on 2.4 GHz signals and its variation in crowds of people, proposes and categorizes possible sensing approaches, applies supervised machine learning algorithms, and demonstrates experimental evaluation results. I categorize four sensing approaches. Firstly, stationary sensors which are sensing crowd centric signals sources. Secondly, stationary sensors which are sensing other stationary signals sources (either opportunistic or special purpose signal sources). Thirdly, a few volunteers within the crowd equipped with sensors which are sensing other surrounding crowd centric device signals (either individually, in a single group or collaboratively) within a small region. Fourthly, a small subset of participants within the crowd equipped with sensors and roaming throughout a whole city to sense wireless crowd centric signals. I present and evaluate an approach with meshed stationary sensors which were sensing crowd centric devices. This was demonstrated and empirically evaluated within an industrial project during three of the world-wide largest automotive exhibitions. With over 30 meshed stationary sensors in an optimized setup across 6400m2 I achieved a mean absolute error of the crowd density of just 0.0115 people per square meter which equals to an average of below 6% mean relative error from the ground truth. I validate the contextual crowd condition anomaly detection method during the visit of chancellor Mrs. Merkel and during a large press conference during the exhibition. I present the approach of opportunistically sensing stationary based wireless signal variations and validate this during the Hannover CeBIT exhibition with 80 opportunistic sources with a crowd condition estimation relative error of below 12% relying only on surrounding signals in influenced by humans. Pursuing this approach I present an approach with dedicated signal sources and sensors to estimate the condition of shared office environments. I demonstrate methods being viable to even detect low density static crowds, such as people sitting at their desks, and evaluate this on an eight person office scenario. I present the approach of mobile crowd density estimation by a group of sensors detecting other crowd centric devices in the proximity with a classification accuracy of the crowd density of 66 % (improvement of over 22% over a individual sensor) during the crowded Oktoberfest event. I propose a collaborative mobile sensing approach which makes the system more robust against variations that may result from the background of the people rather than the crowd condition with differential features taking information about the link structure between actively scanning devices, the ratio between values observed by different devices, ratio of discovered crowd devices over time, team-wise diversity of discovered devices, number of semi- continuous device visibility periods, and device visibility durations into account. I validate the approach on multiple experiments including the Kaiserslautern European soccer championship public viewing event and evaluated the collaborative mobile sensing approach with a crowd condition estimation accuracy of 77 % while outperforming previous methods by 21%. I present the feasibility of deploying the wireless crowd condition sensing approach to a citywide scale during an event in Zurich with 971 actively sensing participants and outperformed the reference method by 24% in average.
Wireless sensor network is formed with the combination of sensor nodes and sink nodes. Recently Wireless sensor network has attracted attention of the research community. The main application of wireless sensor network is security from different attacks both for mass public and military. However securing these networks, by itself is a critical issue due to many constraints like limited energy, computational power and lower memory. Researchers working in this area have proposed a number of security techniques for this purpose. Still, more work needs to be done.In this paper we provide a detailed discussion on security in wireless sensor networks. This paper will help to identify different obstacles and requirements for security of wireless sensor networks as well as highlight weaknesses of existing techniques.
Wireless spectrum regulation is an area of increasing interest, complexity, and importance. After decades of single-purpose, exclusive spectrum allocations, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) brought about the era of dynamically shared spectrum with their landmark ruling in 2008. Although unlicensed spectrum—"free for all" spectrum such as the 2.4 GHz band—is universally agreed to be critical to economic development, there is scarcely enough to meet current demands. WiFi could never have succeeded without sufficient unlicensed spectrum, yet its success has "filled up" much of the available spectrum. In an effort to address the shortage, the FCC ruled that unlicensed devices are now allowed to operate in portions of the television bands.These "unused" portions are called the television whitespaces (TVWS). Due to the excellent propagation characteristics of the TV band frequencies, a commonly discussed application for TVWS is rural broadband, i.e. using wireless to provide last-mile access to high-speed Internet. Typical TVWS trial deployments have demonstrated the use of TVWS spectrum for backhaul, e.g. to connect school buildings in South Africa or for remote video feeds at a zoo. Others envision Internet-of-things (IoT) applications such as garbage can sensors. The critical piece, though, is that TVWS regulations have to have sufficient flexibility to encourage a wide variety of applications and innovation.This thesis largely approaches spectrum regulations from a quantitative perspective. It begins by quantifying the current TVWS opportunity, finding that rural spectrum is abundant while urban spectrum is somewhat scarce. But spectrum alone does not tell the whole story so we next look at the data rates achievable with TVWS under various scenarios. The results of this exploration highlighted a shortcoming of the current regulations: lack of sufficient transmit power in rural areas. This led us to explore dynamic power limits for TVWS, showing that intelligent choices for these limits can dramatically improve the utility of whitespaces.Next, we compare single-use spectrum allocation with whitespaces in the TV band context. We show that allowing the use of whitespaces is superior to repurposing the band from the incumbent's perspective. We also use a novel data set from the FCC to further compare various spectrum allocation schemes.In addition to dynamic power limits, we explore other changes to the whitespace ecosystem that we believe will increase utility and promote innovation among whitespace devices. In particular, we carefully decompose the current whitespace architecture into its constituent parts. The de- composition makes testing and certification easier while at the same time allowing more flexible composition of the components. For example, our proposed architecture allows a smartphone to provide a whitespace device with the information necessary to begin transmission in the TVWS; under the current paradigm, only another whitespace device can provide this support. We also demonstrate how the proposed architecture can enable the use of whitespace devices indoors by allowing a variety and combination of location information sources rather than depending solely on GPS which typically does not work indoors.Whitespaces are not unique to the TV bands. In fact, much of our spectrum lays dormant, particularly in rural areas. While the FCC is currently looking into using whitespace in the 3.5 and 5 GHz bands, we explore the use of whitespaces in the cellular GSM bands. This work dovetails with existing work on community cellular networks (CCNs), community-run cell phone networks in hyper-rural areas, which chiefly lack spectrum in which to legally operate. Our work on GSM whitespaces details how allowing CCNs to use carrier-owned spectrum in rural areas is a win-win-win for regulators, wireless carriers, and citizens alike. We use an existing CCN implementation to demonstrate and evaluate our ideas.One of the most important commonalities in the aforementioned work has been the quantitative approach. Prior work principally explores the space either in a purely theoretical way or with limited real-world data. In contrast, the work in this thesis is almost entirely based on analysis of real-world data, complementing the theoretical work. In an effort to encourage others to explore spectrum regulation from a quantitative perspective, I have made my source code publicly available. Part VI discusses the overall architecture of the Matlab and Python code, as well as some of the design decisions that were made.Since whitespaces present both technical and political problems, we have had the opportunity to submit various official comments to both the FCC and Ofcom. In the spirit of transparency and completeness, we include these comments in Appendix A.
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kabbinale, AR, Dimogerontakis, E, Selimi, M, et al. Blockchain for economically sustainable wireless mesh networks. Concurrency Computat Pract Exper. 2020; 32:e5349, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.5349. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. ; Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low-cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content, and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means that every participant can invest in resources and pay or be paid for usage to recover the costs of network devices and maintenance. While mesh networks and mesh routing protocols enable self-organized networks that expand organically, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts enable the economic coordination among network providers and consumers. We explore and evaluate two existing blockchain software stacks, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and Ethereum geth with Proof of Authority (PoA) intended as a local lightweight distributed ledger, deployed in a real city-wide production mesh network and in laboratory network. We quantify the performance and bottlenecks and identify the current limitations and opportunities for improvement to serve locally the needs of wireless mesh networks, without the privacy and economic cost of relying on public blockchains. ; This paper has been supported by the AmmbrTech Group, the Spanish Government TIN2016‐77836‐C2‐2‐R and the European Community H2020 Programme netCommons (H2020‐688768). The authors would like to thank the people from the Guifi.net (Guifi‐Sants) community network for hosting the servers and supporting the experiments. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)
This study was funded by Spanish MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ (Projects PID2019-103938RB-I00 and ECQ2018-004937-P) and Junta de Andalucía (Projects B-FQM-243-UGR18, P18-RT-2961 and postdoctoral grant of PE DOC_00520). The projects were partially supported by European Regional Development Funds (ERDF). ; Source codes for microcontroller firmware (developed with MPLAB X IDE v5.45) and AndroidTM smartphone application (SmartMask v1.0) are available at an open-access repository (URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/71668) under a Creative Commons license. ; The use of facemasks by the general population is recommended worldwide to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Despite the evidence in favour of facemasks to reduce community transmission, there is also agreement on the potential adverse effects of their prolonged usage, mainly caused by CO2 rebreathing. Herein we report the development of a sensing platform for gaseous CO2 real-time determination inside FFP2 facemasks. The system con- sists of an opto-chemical sensor combined with a flexible, battery-less, near-field-enabled tag with resolution and limit of detection of 103 and 140 ppm respectively, and sensor lifetime of 8 h, which is comparable with recommended FFP2 facemask usage times. We include a custom smartphone application for wireless powering, data processing, alert management, results displaying and sharing. Through performance tests during daily activity and exercise monitoring, we demonstrate its utility for non-invasive, wearable health assessment and its potential applicability for preclinical research and diagnostics. ; B-FQM-243-UGR18 Consejeria de Economia, Innovacion, Ciencia y Empleo, Junta de Andalucia (Ministry of Economy, Innovation, Science and Employment, Government of Andalucia) ; P18-RT-2961 Consejeria de Economia, Innovacion, Ciencia y Empleo, Junta de Andalucia (Ministry of Economy, Innovation, Science and Employment, Government of Andalucia) ; DOC_00520 Consejeria de Economia, Innovacion, Ciencia y Empleo, Junta de Andalucia (Ministry of Economy, Innovation, Science and Employment, Government of Andalucia)
