Firefox OS Ecosystem

Firefox OS is an operating system for mobile devices. It is developed by Mozilla and is based on web technologies. Developed applications are therefore not tied to a given type of hardware. Mozilla works on standardisation of Web APIs, so that the device hardware could be accessed more easily. It also introduced its sign-in system for the Web and furthermore, it wants to redefine the way payments work for mobile applications. Firefox OS is not directly competing with Android and iOS, although it has some common target markets with Android. It could be an opportunity to weaken the iOS and Android duopoly. For now it targets users that don't have smartphones yet and is mostly used on low-end devices. The biggest challenge of Firefox OS is to assure a stable position in the mobile OS ecosystem and to get a large volume of users. Mozilla has an ambition to improve the web and make the web the platform. However developing the Firefox OS and ensuring its important place on the market is difficult because of technological and business limits that will be discussed in this chapter.

Wireless Grids

Wireless grids extend the capability of Grid Computing by including a collection of wireless devices of diverse characteristics, such as sensors, mobile phones, laptops and special instruments. These new resources increase the power and accessibility of grids. Wireless devices can be grid resource consumers or grid resource providers. This chapter focuses in the use of mobile devices as resource providers. Some characteristics of these resources, such as limited CPU power, small screen, short battery life, and intermittent disconnection, are genuine challenges for the development of job management strategies. Our goal is to depict recent proposals in resource discovering, monitoring and job scheduling. The main contributions of the last five years will be described along the chapter. The highlights of the review includes: the use of agent technology; solutions oriented to applications composed of independent tasks and the lack of studies using either real platforms or real data in simulation models.

Future M2M Communication Networks

Machine type communications (or Machine-to-Machine / M2M) communications have emerged as an important paradigm in wireless communication networks. The current M2M standardization activities are presented and their implementation in 4G/LTE networks is described in detail. The chapter is divided in three parts that are related to the evolution of the Future M2M communication Networks. The first part focuses on existing random access management schemes for M2M communications that are presented in the literature. The second part is devoted on spectrum sharing methods and on M2M clustering and it presents the spatial distribution of heterogeneous networks and its impact on their connectivity. Finally, the last part refers to energy efficiency issues of the future M2M communication systems and their implementation using distributed power control and MAC/scheduling algorithms.

Advances in QoS/E Characterization and Prediction for Next Generation Mobile Communication Systems

The scope of this work is to present a holistic approach in quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) characterization and prediction in modern mobile communication networks. Analytically, multi radio access technologies have been deployed in order to deliver mobile services to quality demanded consumers. Quality of Experience (QoE) parameters describe the End-to-End (E2E) quality as experienced by the mobile users. These parameters are difficult to be measured and quantified. System Quality of Service (SQoS) parameters are metrics that are closely related to the network status, and defined from the viewpoint of the service provider rather than the service user. Moreover, E2E Service Quality of Service (ESQoS) parameters describe the QoS of the services and they are obtained directly from the QoE parameters by mapping them into parameters more relevant to network operators, service providers and mobile users. A useful technique for mobile network planning and optimization is to build reliable quality estimation models for mobile voice and video telephony service.

Mobile-Fixed Integration for Next-Generation Mobile Network

In recent years, the growth the in number of heterogeneous interconnected systems, as well as the emergence of new requirements in applications and services are progressively changing the original simplicity and transparency of the Internet architecture. When this architecture was designed, the main goal was to interconnect stationary host. Therefore, the appearance of mobile communications has made necessary to adapt traditional protocols in order to accommodate mobile users. This implies a new interaction between the mobile network and the fixed access network. This chapter describes the main IP mobility protocols and presents a novel classification, which relates the integration of the mobility protocol with the access network. The chapter also presents analytical models to evaluate the registration updates cost and the packet loss rate of the classified protocols.

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

The improved availability of sensor nodes has caused an increase in the number of researchers studying sensor networks. More recently, the introduction of mobility to these networks has been able to find solutions and create applications that were previously not possible. For this reason, this chapter firstly introduces the topic of mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs). It then explores the potential applications of the technology and discusses the challenges and requirements of the communications systems with a focus on routing. It also looks at performance metrics and evaluation techniques in terms of mathematical analysis, simulations and testbed implementations.

Device-to-Device Communications

This chapter provides an account of the most significant areas of scenarios and applications relevant to Device-To-Device (D2D) communications. At first, a state of the art review is provided, with focus on the special technological challenges. In addition, integration initiatives with modern cellular technologies and standards are given. Important architecture concepts like e.g., resource management and mobility issues have been highlighted, in order to present the main areas of impact of D2D communications. Since D2D communications capitalise on the contemporary networking paradigm of cooperative communications novel methods for overcoming several limitations have been discussed and emerging paradigms such as proximity and location-based services, coupled with social networking and commercial services have been considered. Finally, possible future research directions relevant to D2D networking are discussed.

Efficient Configurations for Dynamic Applications in Next Generation Mobile Systems

Next generation wireless systems support a wide range of communication protocols and services, opening new design challenges. The desired flexibility presupposes effective approaches that exploit the system configurations with an optimal way. A well-known state-of-the-art example of a wireless platform is the Software Defined Radio (SDR). SDRs are characterized by strict performance requirements that introduce a lot of dynamism in respect with the resource utilization. Additionally, these devices experience transient overloads due to workload bursts or hardware malfunctions. The aforementioned reasons lead the system to take timely reactions to unexpected usage scenarios. The current chapter concentrates on these design challenges exploiting the system scenario methodology, proposing solutions especially for wireless communication systems. More precisely, it will be studied the tradeoffs between the representativeness of the scenarios (clustering overhead), the implementation of the scenario detection (detection overhead) and the platform tuning cost (switching overhead).

Spectral Efficient Opportunistic Relay Selection Policies for Next Generation Mobile Systems

This book chapter presents various relay selection policies based on spectral efficient techniques for the next generation mobile systems. Successive opportunistic relaying (SOR) that leverages the half-duplex constraint of conventional relays through concurrent transmissions is described, while proposing techniques to reduce the effect of inter-relay interference (IRI). An extension of SOR is defined for the case of out-of-band relaying, when additional spectrum bands are available and in networks with buffer-aided relays. Moreover, the use of full-duplex (FD) relays is outlined, in view of the effect of loop-interference (LI) from the relay's output to its input and, also, the power reduction is presented. As networks with multiple relays suffer from increased coordination overhead, a reduced Channel State Information (CSI) policy is proposed. For every policy, performance evaluation is provided in terms of outage probability, average throughput, power reduction and switching rate. Finally, open problems in spectral-efficient opportunistic relay selection policies are discussed.

Applications of Advanced Reconfigurable Antenna for the Next Generation 4G Communication Devices

The objective of this chapter is to show the applications of innovative reconfigurable antenna methodologies for the 4G devices. Microwave antenna technology can be very useful for the 4G devices, because these products will require high bandwidth and high velocity channel with respect to conventional antennas. This chapter presents a complete picture of possible applications of advanced microwave technologies for 4G devices and systems, it includes methodologies, such as phased and fully adaptive arrays, innovative multiple-Input and multiple-output (MIMO) antennas based on compact rotmans lenses or butler matrix, and the development of innovate reconfigurable antenna based on reconfigurable parasitic structures. The chapter ends with some conclusions and considerations related to ideas for future works.