Consumer Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is an area of m-commerce expected to experience tremendous growth in the next 5 years. This chapter explores consumers’ perceptions and attitudes towards mobile marketing via SMS through a sequential, mixed-methods investigation. Four factors were identified and proven as all having a significant impact on mobile marketing acceptance—permission, content, wireless service provider (WSP) control, and the delivery of the message, which guided the development of a revised and empirically tested model of m-marketing consumer acceptance. The findings also suggest that marketers should be optimistic about choosing to deploy mobile marketing, but exercise caution around the factors that will determine consumer acceptance. The chapter concludes with a discussion about directions for future research.

Key Issues in Mobile Marketing

The growth and convergence of wireless telecommunications and ubiquitous networks has created a tremendous potential platform for providing business services. In consumer markets, mobile marketing is likely to be a key growth area. The immediacy, interactivity, and mobility of wireless devices provide a novel platform for marketing. The personal and ubiquitous nature of devices means that interactivity can, ideally, be provided anytime and anywhere. However, as experience has shown, it is important to keep the consumer in mind. Mobile marketing permission and acceptance are core issues that marketers have yet to fully explain or resolve. This chapter provides direction in this area. After briefly discussing some background on mobile marketing, the chapter conceptualises key characteristics for mobile marketing permission and acceptance. The chapter concludes with predictions on the future of mobile marketing and some core areas of further research.

Developing a Telecommunication Operation Support System (OSS)

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened competition in the telecommunications market in the U.S. and forced the incumbent telecommunications companies to open both their physical and logical infrastructure for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). In this case study we focus on the problems that face a CLEC with regard to designing an information system and getting a back office system, called an Operations Support Systems (OSS), operational in a highly competitive, complex, fast-paced market in a compressed time frame when a change in a critical telecommunications network component, namely the central office switch, is made after 75% of the system implementation was completed. This case deals with the factors that led to this change in central office switches, its impact on the IT department, its impact on the company, and the alternatives considered by the IT department as possible solutions to the many problems created by this change.

Effect of Wireless Channels on the Performance of Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc (MANET) network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. To accomplish forwarding a packet to its destination, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between these nodes. This article presents a variety of results for packet-level simulations for the popular protocol—dynamic source routing (DSR)—when different channel models are used. Different radio propagation models representing the wireless channel have been proposed over the years, each one being suitable for a certain situation. The simplest model that represents wireless propagation is the freespace model. Other propagation models are the tworay ground reflection model and the shadowing model. Simulation results show that the performance metrics are highly affected by the channel model used, even the energy left or the number of nodes left alive are also different.

Supporting Real-Time Service in Packet-Switched Wireless Networks

The requirement of providing real-time data service by wireless networks is a critical issue in the design of current wireless networks. Distributed Queueing Request Update Multiple Access (DQRUMA) has been proposed as a demand assignment medium access control (MAC) protocol to efficiently control the medium sharing by multiple mobile users. With the help of a packet transmission policy, DQRUMA has a potential to provide QoS service for the time-constrained burst data traffic. In this article, we study the problem of providing real-time service to fixed-size packets with or without time constraints in wireless networks. In particular, we propose a novel scheduling scheme for the DQRUMA protocol to control the packet transmission in packet-switched wireless networks. We have conducted extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and to compare its real-time performance with those of other packet transmission policies. This study proves that the new algorithm is an efficient transmission policy for the DQRUMA to support real-time service in wireless networks.

Wireless Networks Based on WiFi and Related Technologies

Multihop wireless networks based on WiFi technology offer flexible and inexpensive networking possibilities. Applications of multihop wireless networks range from personal networks within consumer homes to citywide departmental networks to wide-area vehicular ad hoc networks. In this chapter, we focus on multihop ad hoc networks with communication among user devices and access points, where available, without the restriction that the user devices need to be within the radio range of access points. We first describe pure WiFi networks and their limitations. Next we discuss mixed networks based on WiFi and other wired and wireless technologies to provide robust city-scale networks. This chapter also explores security issues and vulnerabilities of wireless networks. An emerging application of WiFi ad hoc networks-RFID (radio frequency identification) networks based on the WiFi technology for warehouses and large retail stores-is presented. This chapter also presents another emerging application of WiFi-based networks: vehicular ad hoc networks for automobiles.

Software Agent Technology for Supporting Ad Hoc Virtual Enterprises

This chapter introduces a new idea of using software agents for supporting ad hoc virtual enterprises and similar forms of temporal businessto- business collaboration. It seems that current information and telecommunication technologies, based on information interchange and local data processing, are not flexible enough to deal with modern business requirements, especially dynamic and temporal business relations, heterogeneity of hardware, software and communication means, and data complexity. The proposed approach differs in the distribution of both data and programs for data treatment at-the-place and just-in-time. The distributed and remotely executed programs, software agents, are autonomous entities, targeted on obtaining preprogrammed goals, and working in the name and under the authority of their owners. The authors hope that the proposed techniques for agent preparation, distribution, and execution make the whole system safe and secure, providing an efficient environment for a wide spectrum of temporal and ad hoc business collaboration.

Designing a Resilient and High Performance Network

This article describes the detailed configuration and LAN infrastructure design at the University of Bahrain (UOB). The article describes the configuration based on the new setup and migration requirements and indicates how the design satisfies those requirements. The article explains the detailed configuration of the design process of the distribution layer switches and shows how these switches can be configured in the final implementation. The article also discusses the modifications that occurred during the implementation/migration phase. The design of the network at UOB campuses incorporates resiliency into the network core in order to manage problems effectively. This will enable user access points to remain connected to the network even in the event of a failure. This incorporation aims to provide services and benefits to users without impediments.

Fractal Geometry and Computer Science

Fractal geometry can help us to describe the shapes in nature (e.g., ferns, trees, seashells, rivers, mountains) exceeding the limits imposed by Euclidean geometry. Fractal geometry is quite young: The first studies are the works by the French mathematicians Pierre Fatou (1878-1929) and Gaston Julia (1893-1978) at the beginning of the 20th century. However, only with the mathematical power of computers has it become possible to realize connections between fractal geometry and other disciplines. It is applied in various fields now, from biology to economy. Important applications also appear in computer science because fractal geometry permits us to compress images, and to reproduce, in virtual reality environments, the complex patterns and irregular forms present in nature using simple iterative algorithms executed by computers. Recent studies apply this geometry to controlling traffic in computer networks (LANs, MANs, WANs, and the Internet). The aim of this chapter is to present fractal geometry, its properties (e.g., self-similarity), and their applications in computer science.

Trust Models for Ubiquitous Mobile Systems

This chapter introduces the notion of trust as a means to establish security in ubiquitous mobile network systems. It argues that trust is an essential requirement to enable security in any open network environments, and in particular, in wireless ad hoc environments where there is no network topology. In such environments, communication can only be achieved via routes that have to be trusted. In general it may be hard, or even impossible, to establish, recall, and maintain trust relationships. It is therefore important to understand the limitations of such environments and to find mechanisms that may support trust either explicitly or implicitly. We consider several models that can be used to enable trust in such environments, based on economic, insurance, information flow, and evolutionary paradigms.