First International Conference on
Next-Generation Wireless Systems (ICNEWS’06)

2-4 January, 2006
Dhaka Sheraton Hotel, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Technically Co-Sponsored by IEEE Communications Society

Title: Introduction to Telecommunications (mobile and land-line), Technology, Operations, Business and Management 

Presenter:  Dr. M. Abdul Awal and Dr. Khaled Mahmud, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh (email: (abdulawal@northsouth.edu, kmahmud@northsouth.edu)

Abstract:  This tutorial, specifically targeted for the beginners, will cover major topic of telecommunication, both land-line and mobile communication. We will offer a Overview of Telecom Industry: wire line and wireless along with global technology and business trends and current industry dynamics in telecom, and telecom operations and telecom service provider business models. The tutorial will also contain these major topics- PSTN and mobile operator business overview, value added services; review of a telecommunication system: Telephone set, Local Switch, Toll switch, Core Network, and Transport Backbone; review of 2^nd and 3^rd generation mobile technology options: GSM, CDMA, WCDMA; submarine cable, VSAT, Intelsat and overseas connectivity; subscriber access loop system analysis, WLL vs traditional system; Voice over IP and call termination protocol; value added PSTN services and competitive differentiation in the market; understanding cost, pricing and tariff structure of voice and data services; interconnectivity issues with other operators and solution options; review of Bangladesh PSTN and Mobile Market: Current and future  Challenges; regulatory Issues, Monitoring, Enforcements, Licensing costs; investment analysis options in the PSTN operations, and understanding strategic partnership issues for joint venture options. During this tutorial, you can expect to gain an overview of the telecom business and technology and identify key performance index and impact of the key parameters in the business. After this tutorial, you will understand how a Mobile or a PSTN operator design its business by deploying the most appropriate technologies and other organizational structure to achieve its business goals, be able to analyze and evaluate various decision options in the PSTN business, identify the short term and long term business objectives, and a process how to achieve, be able communicate with your suppliers, regulators, and technical staff of your company.

Tutorial - 2

Title:  IEEE 802.11 WLAN Deployments while Achieving QoS, Security, and Mobility: A Practical Aspect

Presenter: Mahbubul Alam and Shah Rahman, CISCO Systems, Inc. USA

(email: maalam@cisco.com, sharahma@cisco.com)

Abstract:   Today, we are witnessing that IEEE 802.11 (or Wi-Fi)-based Wireless LANs (WLANs) are being widely accepted for many different applications. This wireless technology was originally developed as a replacement of Ethernet by providing up to 2 Mbps transmission rates. The state-of-the-art 802.11 now supports up to 54 Mbps rates at much lower cost, and its speed is still growing today via on-going standardization efforts. With growing popularity, there has been a strong desire to enhance this wireless Ethernet technology in many aspects including QoS, security, and mobility supports. Accordingly, during the last few years, there have been lots of efforts made across industry and standard groups. There also have been heavy research efforts in academia for better understanding of the protocol and network performance. This tutorial will cover most of the recent updates in the 802.11 technology covering QoS across wired and wireless network, wireless mesh, mobility, and security while touching the technical details as closely as possible.

Tutorial - 3

Title: IP-Oriented QoS in the Next Generation Networks: application to wireless networks

Presenter:  Professor Pascal Lorenz, University of Haute-Alsace, France

(email: lorenz@ieee.org)

Abstract:  Emerging Internet Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms are expected to enable wide spread use of real time services such as VoIP and videoconferencing. The "best effort" Internet delivery cannot be used for the new multimedia applications. New technologies and new standards are necessary to offer Quality of Service (QoS) for these multimedia applications. Therefore new communication architectures integrate mechanisms allowing guaranteed QoS services as well as high rate communications.

 The service level agreement with a mobile Internet user is hard to satisfy, since there may not be enough resources available in some parts of the network the mobile user is moving into. The emerging Internet QoS architectures, differentiated services and integrated services, do not consider user mobility. QoS mechanisms enforce a differentiated sharing of bandwidth among services and users. Thus, there must be mechanisms available to identify traffic flows with different QoS parameters, and to make it possible to charge the users based on requested quality. The integration of fixed and mobile wireless access into IP networks presents a cost effective and efficient way to provide seamless end-to-end connectivity and ubiquitous access in a market where the demand for mobile Internet services has grown rapidly and predicted to generate billions of dollars in revenue.

 This tutorial covers to the issues of QoS provisioning in heterogeneous networks and Internet access over future wireless networks as well as ATM, MPLS, DiffServ, IntServ frameworks. It discusses the characteristics of the Internet, mobility and QoS provisioning in wireless and mobile IP networks. This tutorial also covers routing, security, baseline architecture of the inter-networking protocols and end to end traffic management issues.                                                    

Presenter:  Dr. Hafizur Rahman, Infineon Technologies, RF Power Division, AZ, USA (email: Hafizur.Rahman@infineon.com)

Abstract:  This tutorial will begin with the introduction of wireless infrastructure and transceiver systems and role of Power Amplifiers in such systems. It will work through the step by step design methodology of power amplifiers with particular emphasis on all the design considerations and choosing the right device technology. It will also cover important topics as “Linearization” of power amplifiers and efficiency improvement with particular emphasis on different modulation and multiple access techniques such GSM, EDGEGSM, CDMA and WCDMA. The session will end with introduction to the design tools and business perspective of outsourcing the fabrication of the PCB and MMIC process and requirements for setting up lab for testing, tuning and troubleshooting.

Tutorial - 5

Presenter:  Dr. Nemai C. Karmakar, Senior Lecturer, Monash University, Clayton Campus,

Australia (email: nemai.karmakar@eng.monash.edu.au, website: http://www.ecse.monash.edu.au/staff/karmakar)

Abstract: With the emergence of wireless mobile communications, the last decade has witnessed a tremendous development in wireless mobile communications. The recent trend is toward achieving the universal global mobile connectivity. The motto is “anyone, anywhere, anytime” communications though the portable mobile handheld terminals, which certainly need more functionality per unit volume. While different transceiver modules are readily available in the market to meet the universal demand for mobile handsets, to date the antenna remains a big challenge to accommodate all these bands. Various efforts have been made and reported in the open literature. The tutorial will highlight these challenging tasks for antenna designers. Design theories of various internally embedded antennas will be presented. These antennas include both fixed frequency and frequency agile antennas. Some recent development of smart antennas for mobile communications will also be highlighted.

Presenter:  Shakil Ahmed, Fraunhofer AIS/KD Sankt Augustin, Germany

(email: shakil.ahmed@ais.fraunhofer.de, shakil_ulm@yahoo.com

Abstract: In recent years, advances in miniaturization, low-power circuit-design, simple, low power yet reasonably efficient wireless communication equipment and improved small-scale energy supplies have combined with reduced manufacturing costs to make a new technological vision possible: Wireless sensor networks.

A sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes, which are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. These tiny sensor nodes, which consist of sensing, data processing, and communicating components, leverage the idea of sensor networks based on collaborative effort of a large number of nodes. In contrast to a pure ad hoc network, the information flow in a sensor network is fundamentally governed by the activity of the physical environment sensed by the nodes.

With the coming availability of low cost, short range radios along with advances in wireless networking, it is expected that wireless ad hoc sensor networks will become commonly deployed.  In these networks, each node may be equipped with a variety of sensors, such as acoustic, seismic, infrared, still/motion video camera etc. These nodes may be organized in clusters such that a locally occurring event can be detected by most of, if not all, the nodes in a cluster.  Each node may have sufficient processing power to make a decision, and it will be able to broadcast this decision to the other nodes in the cluster.  One node may act as the cluster master, and it may also contain a longer range radio using a protocol such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE802.15.4 or Bluetooth. The network is often aimed to share intelligece by distributed processing of cognition and the central processing unit (i.e. the gateway) combines all the local learning model to take a global or centralized decision. The wide varity of  application area incudes environmental monoitoring, industry automation, structural health monitoring, secured surveillance, smart home, remote health monitoring etc. Considerable researches are going on to make the network intelligent by implementing efficient algorithms of machine learning and distributed data mining.

The tutorial is based on the following 3 sections:

·          State of the art (one hour): The state of the art  in the area of 1) Application aspects, 2) Hardware architecture 3) Wireless Sensor Networks standards 4) Communication Protocols will be explained

·          Middleware and Embedded OS(one hour): Middleware from the physical layer to the application layer including the structure and application of a widely used operating system TinyOS (ref: http://www.tinyos.net) will be described

·          Distributed Intelligence Over WSN (one hour): Some algorithms of distributed real time data mining with a state of art of currently used machine learning techniques using multi-agent-systems (MAS) for network learning will be described.