Technology Unlimited

2011-09-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Read my new article in Connected Planet on "Implementing 2-sided revenue models in IMS: challenges and opportunities"
http://connectedplanetonline.com/IP-NGN/news/implementing-two-sided-revenue-models-in-ims-challenges-and-opportunities-0919/

Role of Interconnect Network in enabling HD Voice

2011-06-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

VoIP traffic has been growing exponentially in recent years in both fixed and mobile networks, as enterprises and consumers seek to improve efficiency and reduce costs by increasing their adoption of IP services. At the same time, the emergence of HD voice promises to deliver on the potential of VoIP by offering clear and life-like reproduction of audio.

http://emags.tmcnet.com/emags/2011/uc/UC_Jun2011.pdf

Beyond the Border: Differentiating IPX services with value added features

2011-06-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Beyond the Border: Differentiating IPX services with value added features

http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/columns/articles/114420-beyond-border-differentiating-ipx-services-with-value-added.htm

IPX - Connected Planet Article

2011-06-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

Connected Planet Article:

http://connectedplanetonline.com/IP-NGN/news/sonus-plays-ip-match-maker-with-ipx-ipv6-solutions-0603/

Moving up the Value Chain and Capturing New Revenue Streams with IMS

2011-06-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

NGN Article: Moving up the Value Chain and Capturing New Revenue Streams with IMS

http://www.tmcnet.com/ngnmag/features/articles/147370-moving-up-value-cha-and-capturing-new-revenue.htm

Smartphone OS update

2011-01-20T09:06:00.000-08:00

In an earlier blog posting, I had commented on the smartphone OS market. Since then, Symbian Foundation has transitioned to a licensing body and Nokia has taken full ownership of the Symbian OS. Today, very few other handset manufacturers use the Symbian OS in their products. However, recently, Nokia released some smartphones based on the Symbian OS (such as N8 and C3) that seem to be doing very well in the market.

I continue to believe that, in the long run, Android and iPhone OS will triumph in the marketplace. The iPhone OS relies entirely on iPhone sales. Android, on the other hand, runs on a variety of phones from different handset manufacturers. As a result, in the long run, Android will be the No.1 smartphone OS in the market. Windows has a good product in WP7, and there are rumors that Nokia will OEM MIcrosoft's WP7. However, it is unlikely that WP7 will take away any market share from Android and iPhone OS. In the long run, there will be only 2 OS running on smartphones - iPhone OS running on all iPhones, and Android running on all other smartphones.

My ranking of smartphone OS:

Android
iPhone OS
BLackberry OS
Microsoft WM7
Symbian
Linux-based

LTE Releases - A Commentary

2010-03-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

3GPP is responsible for defining the specifications for a number of wireless standards such as GSM, GPRS, UMTS, HSPA, IMS, and LTE. 3GPP specifications are organized and issued as “Releases” – Release 99, Release 1, Release 2, etc. However, each Release and, in many cases, each specification within a Release, includes changes and updates to multiple standards such as GPRS, UMTS, IMS etc. For the average reader, this is confusing and it is sometimes difficult to ascertain which section(s) of a specification or which update applies to which standard.

For example, the Release 8 March 2009 version of the 3GPP specifications is considered to be the first stable reference release for all LTE commercial products. This is not necessarily obvious to an average reader. Subsequent LTE releases are all expected to be backward compatible with this release. In fact, Release 8 is the first 3GPP release that defines the LTE specifications.

Release 9 builds on the functionality specified in Release 8, and includes a number of enhancements. These include enhancements to Home Node B (also called Femto Cells), definition of the requirements for LTE Home Node B, Emergency Calls for VoIP, MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service), LTE Self Organizing Networks, among others.

Release 10 introduces “LTE Advanced” which is expected to provide true 4G speeds at 100Mbps peak. This is achieved by aggregating spectrum for better bandwidth. This release is expected to be available in March 2011 and will be backward compatible with the previous releases. Release 10 is expected to be a “major” release – any operator deploying Release 10 can apply the trademarked label “LTE Advanced” to its network. Release 10 is expected to provide full support for LTE Home Node B (LTE Femto Cells), as well as fully specify LTE Self Organizing Networks (SON). SON is important in LTE due to the flat nature of the network in which Node Bs interface with each other over the X2 interface.

LTE specifications are expected to support both Voice and Data, contrary to popular notion that it only supports Data. Support for Voice is enabled through a series of updates to the 3GPP specifications, such as the support high quality VOIP encoding in Release 7 (to match the quality of circuit switched voice calls), support for IMS emergency calls in Release 7, and updates to the radio and core network in Release 8. Support for Voice in LTE will be based on IMS, and is being specified in conjunction with a GSMA initiative called “Voice Over LTE” (previously called OneVoice).

GSM Association - time for a new name

2010-03-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

At the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the three largest CDMA operators in the world, Verizon Wireless, KDDI, and China Telecom, announced that they were joining the GSM Association. Qualcomm, considered by many to be one of the leading proponents of the CDMA technology, is also an associate member of the GSM Association. This then raises the larger question: should the GSM Association drop the word “GSM” and re-label itself as Mobile Association or something similar? With both CDMA and GSM/UMTS operators deploying LTE in the next several years, the differences between the 2 sets of operators are starting to blur. The GSM World Congress realized this trend and renamed itself to Mobile World Congress some years back. It may now be time for the GSM Association to follow suit and re-label itself as well.

Smartphone OS - battle for dominance

2010-02-26T19:16:00.000-08:00

The smartphone market is growing exponentially every year. Some analysts estimate that smartphones account for 25% of all mobile phones sold today. This is likely to increase significantly over the next several years.

The battle for dominance, and in some cases, survival in the Smartphone OS market is reaching a decisive stage. Android and iPhone have the momentum at present, followed by Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Linux is fast losing traction in the smartphone market and may eventually be a non-player in this market segment. And, of course, one cannot dismiss the Palm OS which has received some good reviews, and has a strong presence in the US smartphone market. In the US market, RIM holds the No.1 spot in the smartphone category, followed by iPhone.

iPhone is the most popular OS platform for third party application development today. However, it is a semi-closed system and Apple has not licensed its OS to other device manufacturers. Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, on the other hand, are open OS platforms that have been licensed to a number of device manufacturers. Mobile devices based on these OS platforms are available from a number of vendors. On the other hand, Blackberry OS is available only from RIM.

Symbian leads the worldwide smartphone market today with 40% to 50% market share, but its market share has been steadily declining over the last few years. Symbian dominates in Europe, but has limited presence in the US. Symbian is an OS that has been designed and optimized specifically to run on mobile devices, and has undergone a lot of changes over the last several years. Until recently, there were multiple variants of the OS; UIQ, S60 and MOAP. Today, Symbian is owned by Nokia and there is only version (S60). The Symbian OS is open source and is freely available to interested developers. The current version of the OS is v3, which corresponds to S60 5^th Edition (actually Symbian v1 corresponds to S60 5^th Edition). Symbian OS uses a microkernel architecture, which contains a minimum set of OS functions. This is supported by a set of servers that provide other required functionality (networking, file system mgt, telephony services, etc). Symbian programming is done in C++; developing prototypes and demos is easy and efficient in Symbian.

Windows Mobile, which some pundits had initially predicted would take over the smartphone OS market (ie., a repeat of Windows’ success in the PC OS market), has been losing market share and momentum to Android over the last year. In an effort to reverse this trend, Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned version of the OS called Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress in February. This new OS is based on the Windows CE 6 kernel. It has a completely new UI, Outlook and Office support, and Zune and Xbox support. However, this OS has stringent hardware requirements for third party device manufacturers such as large WVGA screen with a single aspect ratio, accelerometer, FM radio, WiFi, AGPS, 5 (no more, no less) specific hardware buttons, including one for Bing Search. Mandating a specific button for Bing is an aggressive attempt to promote its search engine (over Google’s search engine). The first set of smartphones based on Windows Phone 7 are due to be released towards the end of this year. The jury is still out on whether Windows Phone 7 will salvage Microsoft’s standing in the smartphone OS market. So far, Windows OS has not generated the level of excitement and interest among the application developer community that we have seen for iPhone and Android.

Google’s Android OS is based on Linux. It was developed by Android Inc, which was acquired by Google. Android supports third party application development using Java, and the Android SDK includes a number of Java libraries. However, Android uses a non-standard version of Java (not the standard Java ME), thereby making applications written in standard Java incompatible with the Android Java environment. The Android OS is available as open source to third party developers. There are at least 20-30 phone models on the market today that use the Android OS. This year is expected to see an exponential increase in the number of Android based phones in the market.

Palm OS, which has received positive reviews from industry experts, is based on Linux and has incorporated many of the Web 2.0 functionality. It has a limited market share and is not expected to be an important player in the smartphone OS market.

The Blackberry OS is a proprietary multi-tasking smartphone OS developed by RIM for Blackberry devices. RIM provides a set of APIs for application developers. This OS runs exclusively on Blackberry devices, and occupies the No.1 spot in the US smartphone OS market.

There is another smartphone OS worth mentioning – Maemo. This is a Linux based OS developed by Nokia. However, at the Mobile World Congress in February, Nokia announced that it was merging the Maemo project with Moblin (Mobile Linux developed by the Linux Foundation) to create a new smartphone OS called MeeGo.

As the smartphone market evolves, it is very likely that the top 3 OS platforms will be iPhone, Android and the proprietary Blackberry. iPhone and Android platforms are expected to attract the largest number of third party application developers. Symbian and Windows may continue to see market share erosion, and some level of consolidation can be expected in the smartphone OS market in the long run.

GSM Evolution and the RF Technology changes

2010-02-14T20:30:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered why the GSM mobile standards community keeps changing the RF technology with each evolution? The original GSM standard is based on TDMA RF technology. When GSM evolved to UMTS (3G), the RF technology was changed to spread spectrum (WCDMA). The RF technology once again changed with LTE, the 4G evolution of the standard, to OFDMA.

TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) was chosen for the original GSM standard back in the late 1980s/1990 to make more efficient use of the radio spectrum by enabling higher capacity to be supported in a given radio spectrum (bandwidth) when compared to the previous 1G analog RF technology (FDMA). In GSM, the 200Khz carrier frequencies are time division multiplexed between different users, with each user using the carrier frequency for 1/8th of the time (0.577ms).

WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) was chosen for UMTS to meet the requirement for higher data rates, for higher capacity and to perform well in dense areas (city centers, etc). Carrier frequencies were allocated in chunks of 5MHz. TDMA technology could not meet the performance and data rate requirements specified for UMTS.

LTE, the 4G evolution of the GSM technology, uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) for the downlink and Single Carrier FDMA for the uplink. OFDMA was chosen for multiple reasons:

Flexibility in spectrum allocation. OFDMA can be deployed in spectrum ranging from 1.5 MHz to 20MHz. WCDMA, on the other hand, required spectrum in multiples of 5 MHz.
Requirement for higher bandwidth and data rates. In UMTS, 5 MHz spectrum allocation limits the maximum achievable data rate.
Lower latency with OFDMA.
Better tolerance to multipath fading and interference.

What will the RF technology be when the GSM technology evolves to 5G in several years? We’ll just have to wait and see …

Distracted Driving Mobile Application

2010-01-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the US about Distracted Driving. Recently, the US Department of Transportation sponsored a summit to understand the risks related to Distracted Driving and discuss potential approaches to addressing the problem. In fact, just this week, the US Government issued a blanket ban on texting by commercial trucks and buses.

Distracted Driving essentially deals with the use of mobile phones while driving, specifically to receive or make voice calls, and/or read or send text messages. Suggested solution approaches range from making vehicles a “mobile free” zone by jamming the signals to slapping huge fines on anyone caught using the mobile phone while driving. However, a smartphone application can be designed to intelligently disable certain capabilities of the phone during driving, without any user intervention. Using the GPS capability, the application can determine the speed of the vehicle. If it is over a certain speed (such as 10 mph), it can disable certain communication features on the phone.

In the US, states enact their own laws on Distracted Driving. For example, in some states, both texting and voice phone calls are banned while driving, whereas in other states, only texting is banned. An intelligent application will take these variations in laws into account. Using location coordinates and mapping capability (maps can be stored locally on the phone), the Application can determine the state the mobile device is in. A static table containing the Distracted Driving rules for each state can be created and maintained by the Application. By querying this table, the Application can determine which features to turn off/on for a specific state. For example, if the vehicle crosses a state border, the Application can be triggered to automatically query the table and decide if it has to turn on/off any of the Distracted Driving features (incoming voice calls, incoming messages, sending messages, making voice calls). Changes in Distracted Driving rules for a state can be pushed to the phone over the air. This can be achieved by sending an SMS to the phone with a link to download the new version of the Application.

One of the technical challenges that a Distracted Driving solution needs to address is to be able to determine if the user is the driver or a passenger in the vehicle. Passengers should be allowed to freely use mobile phones without any restriction. One of the approaches is to automatically enable specific Distracted Driving features (based on the regulations in the state) for all occupants of the vehicle initially when the Application determines that the speed is over the pre-set threshold. A message can be displayed on the phone screen indicating this. Distracted Driving features can be manually turned off by pressing a complex sequence of keys on the keyboard. This procedure must require the use of 2 hands, and should be sufficiently difficult for the driver to execute while driving. This ensures that only passengers can disable the Distracted Driving feature. A timeout interval can be introduced whereby the Distracted Driving feature is turned off automatically when the vehicle is below the speed threshold (say, 10 mph) continuously for 10 minutes or so, indicating that the user is no longer in the vehicle.

This is not a fool proof procedure and a driver who is determined to work around it can do so. However, this procedure should prevent most drivers from turning the feature off while driving.

Accelerometer Health Monitoring

2009-12-11T18:58:00.000-08:00

Mobile Health Monitoring requires the collection of health data using various methods. Some types of data can be manually entered (for example, a person's weight or calories), other types of data can be collected through a wireless zigbee or bluetooth interface from body sensors. And then there are other types of health related data that can be collected using the accelerometer capability that is available on some of the smartphones these days. For example, the iPhone has a built-in LIS302DL 3-axis accelerometer. The accelerometer measures the vibration or motion of the phone; this data can be collected and transmitted to a server for processing and analysis.

One of the interesting health monitoring applications using the accelerometer is that of remote pregnancy monitoring. A pregnant female may require periodic evaluation of her physiological condition, as well as the in-utero fetus, during pregnancy. Under normal circumstances, this monitoring will require visits to the physician's office. A mobile phone with built-in accelerometer can be used to remotely monitoring some of the conditions and report the results to the physician's office, thereby reducing the number of visits to the doctor's office. The phone can be placed on the exterior of the patient's abdomen and record some of the internal movements using the motion detection capability provided by the accelerometer.

Mobile Health Monitoring

2009-11-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

Health Monitoring is a market that is growing at an exponential pace and the demand for health monitoring worldwide is exploding. Today, there are 52,000 pharmaceutical clinical trials and each of them require participants to be monitored throughout the duration of the trial. There are over 860 Million chronic disease patients worldwide today, and this number is growing rapidly. Many of the chronic diseases require patients to be monitored regularly for vital signs, etc. Caring for patients with chronic disease accounts for 4/5^th of the health care expenditure in the US, and accounts for over $1.5 trillion annually. This puts a heavy load on the already overworked health care system. If this work can be reduced or eliminated, the health care system will be freed up to provide other services to patients. Another population segment that needs constant health monitoring is the elderly (60+ years). There are over 600 Million people worldwide who are over 60 years or older. This number continues to increase, and is creating further strain on the health care system. Another market that is interested in health monitoring is the Health and Wellness market. Weight Loss and Diet services and Personal Fitness services fall in this category.

Current health monitoring methods are largely manual, and are slow and labor intensive. They are unable to meet the exploding market demands for health monitoring, including clinical trials. As the demand increases, the gap between supply and demand grows wider in the health monitoring market. For example, it is estimated that there will be shortage of over 1million nurses for the monitoring of elderly patients in the next decade or so.

A second issue is the rising cost of delivering health care and monitoring patients. This is particularly true for clinical trials. Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development has been tracking drug development costs -- providing some of the most closely watched and influential findings in the country on the pharmaceutical industry. The Tufts experts released their newest research on development costs -- a meteoric $802 million per drug -- almost triple the $231 million estimate Tufts released in 1987 -- stunned many experts on the industry. But the Tufts researchers said rising costs throughout the process -- from initial research to clinical trials -- have pushed development costs ever higher. "Tufts' Center Director Dr. Kenneth Kaitin attributes the staggering increase... to the soaring costs of human clinical testing," reported the Boston Globe. "The size of clinical trials has steadily increased in the past two decades at the same time that volunteers have become more scarce. As researchers learn more about the potential hazards posed by drugs, companies are also required to run a growing battery of safety tests."

The solution to this problem is to automate and streamline the health monitoring process as much as possible. Mobile technology is seen as a key enabler to extending health monitoring outside the health care provider’s office to a home setting. There are over 3 billion mobile phones in the world, and this number is increasing exponentially every year. In some countries, mobile users have surpassed regular landline telephone users. For many segments of the population, a mobile phone is the only phone that they own. This trend is happening in both underdeveloped countries such as China and India where the cost of deploying landline telephone networks is cumbersome and costly, as well as in developed countries such as the US. As the popularity of the mobile phones has increased, so has their functionality. Mobile phones have become a platform for delivering a growing variety of applications and services. Mobile phones have some attributes that make them particularly well suited for delivering health care applications. They are (a) Personal, (b) Ubiquitous, (c) Connected and (d) Increasingly Intelligent. Therefore, mobile technology is the ideal vehicle for creating a remote home based personal health monitoring/delivery solution. Mobile technology enables health providers to monitor patients remotely and to extend the reach of health care, ultimately making it available anytime anywhere.

Recently, the California HealthCare Foundation conducted an extensive study on the role of wireless in health care. Some observations from their report are worth reproducing here:

As mobile devices and networks become more versatile and capable, they offer expanded opportunities to link patients continuously to the health care system. Remote monitoring enables providers to rapidly identify signs of abnormal function and provide timely intervention to avoid larger problems. Mobile applications may be the most cost-effective way to manage millions of chronically ill patients.
Because mobile phones are personal and ubiquitous, they offer the ability to deliver health-related information whenever and wherever it can be most effective.
A world of pervasive mobile networks and remote sensors could make it possible to move from a health care system that primarily provides episodic treatment of acute problems to one that is better able to manage chronic conditions continuously. As remote delivery of health care services becomes more feasible, the locus of diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions will shift from traditional settings such as clinics and hospitals to the patient’s location.

Key stakeholders from various industries formed an alliance called the Continua Alliance to address the health monitoring problem and to create guidelines for an open and interoperable remote personal health monitoring system. Some of the leaders from various markets such as Mobile Devices (Nokia, Samsung, Motorola), Mobile Operators (Orange, AT&T, Sprint, etc), Pharmaceutical Companies (Baxter, Pfizer, etc), medical insurance companies, telecom vendors (Cisco, Siemens, etc). New England based Harvard Medical School plays an important role in the Continua Alliance and hosted one of the summit meetings. The deliberation within the Continua Alliance confirms the interest within the industry to utilize mobile technology for remote health monitoring and delivery.

A Mobile Health Monitoring Solution should consist of a Client Software running on standard smartphones based on Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and Linux operating systems, a Monitoring software running on standard server platforms, and a real time Reporting System. The solution architecture should also allow for the introduction of new applications and services in a modular fashion.

The Client software running on the smartphone should interact with Bluetooth or Zigbee enabled medical sensors using a secure protocol to obtain health related readings, which are then transmitted to a centralized Server using a secure link. Detailed real time and trending reports can be produced on the Server using this data. The Server should also support automatic real time health care provider alert capability either through SMS or by dialing a call center attendant. The Server should provide interfaces to the hospital or health care provide backend systems. A Care Give Web Portal allows authorized individuals to view specific health monitoring data that is relevant to them. This, for example, allows elderly health monitoring data to be viewed by the monitored person’s spouse/child. The Server can also be connected to Social Networking Sites that allow monitored patients (such as participants in a clinical trial) to set up community groups to share information with each other.

The Solution should also take advantage of inherent capabilities of a mobile phone, such as camera and the ability to record videos, by allowing pictures and video clips to be included as part of the health monitoring data sent to the Server. For example, during clinical trials, a participant can send photo of a specific skin reaction that he/she may be experiencing as a result of taking the drug. Location information can also be incorporated in the health monitoring data sent to the Server by utilizing the GPS/location capabilities of today’s smartphones. The Solution can also interface with a Health Advertising Application to deliver targeted advertisements to smartphones.

Features supported by the client software should include:

Downloadable Java ME Client that supports multiple monitoring applications
Medication & Monitoring Alerts
Data Collection and transmission to server

Bluetooth/Zigbee interface to measuring devices

Soft “Hot Button” for emergency purposes
Location support
Interface with Community Groups (Social Networking Sites)
Local backup of measurement data storage
Support for AES encryption with 256-bit key

Features supported by the Server should include:

Monitoring Patient Enrollment & Provisioning System
Client Configuration & OTA download

Software upgrade, sensor setting, data collection interval, etc

Image/Video Monitoring
Reporting System

Configurable reports based on the monitoring data collected from clients

Real Time Plotting of monitoring data
Message Alert System (SMS Alert and Call Center Alert)
Consumer medical information to client

interface with third party content sources (such as WebMD)

API/Interface to EMR/PMR systems
Community Group interface

Example: Participants share information during a clinical trial
Integrate with third party social networking sites

Push based Appointment scheduling
Web based Consumer Portal

For access to monitoring data and reports for Care Givers and Self

Location tracking (interface with location services)

Location tracking data received from clients

The Client software should also run on a PC, with connectivity to the Server through PC supported mechanisms (DSL, WiFi, etc).