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GUEST EDITORIAL
TRENDS IN CONSUMER COMMUNICATIONS: MORE SERVICES AND MEDIA, LESS WIRES
Mario Kolberg
C
Madjid Merabti
urrent major themes in the consumer communications area are media delivery, and wireless and mobile connectivity to consumer electronic devices. These themes are also strongly represented in the articles in this issue of the Consumer Communications and Networking Series. We have selected seven articles covering a broad range of topics within these themes from multimedia communications, to video delivery to in-home wireless technologies, to mobile technologies, and to privacy and security. The wide range of subject matter in this edition of the series reflects the increasing penetration of communications technology into all areas of consumer electronics (CE). For example, more and more devices that can be deployed in the home are utilizing wireless technology, and as the different devices have different communications requirements (e.g., streaming A/V for entertainment vs. low-bit-rate telemetry for meter reading), multiple technologies are being employed. Additionally, the increasing use by more people and more devices of communications in CE devices is generating new sets of requirements that were not previously recognized (e.g., group communications across multiple heterogeneous networks, the need for/awareness of privacy in CE devices). All of these trends are driving new research areas and generating more interest in this niche. Again, this issue of the series provides an excellent example of the impacts of these trends. The specific articles that constitute this edition of the series are as follows. “Technology and Market Conditions Evolving toward a New Competitive Landscape in Mobile Services” by Beltran, Melus, and Gutieerrez depicts an evolutionary path for mobile telecommunications based on new broadband access technologies, spectrum management techniques, policy-based network management, and the emergence of new entrants and business models. “Sharing Enriched Multimedia Experiences across Heterogeneous Network Infrastructures” by Hesselman et al. describes a novel service platform that allows applications to easily manage sessions across multiple networks, in particular for sharing services and content in relatively small groups of
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users, such as friends or families. “Personal Environment Service Based on the Integration of Mobile Communications and Wireless Personal Area Networks” by Oh and Haas presents a network architecture (and underlying technologies) for enabling an environment that recreates a user's customized living or working environment in accordance with user-defined settings and in response to the user's mobility. “Ginga-NCL in IPTV Platforms” by Gomes Soares et al. presents features of an open middleware specification for multimedia IPTV services. “An MST-Based Network Architecture for Sharing Broadcast TV Programs” by Chung et al. describes an architecture for access networks that support the presence of PVRs or shared disks that consumers can use to source video programs. “Wireless Home Automation Networks: Architectures and Technologies” by Gomez and Paradells provides a survey of current and emerging wireless networking technologies that enable home control and automation. “Privacy Enhancements for Mobile and Social Uses of Consumer Electronics” by Falchuk and Loeb details a middleware architecture and methodology that can help give users of buddy-mapping services greater awareness of who is about to see them before they are actually seen. If the articles in this series are of interest to you, we strongly urge you to consider participating in the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC) 2011 that will be held next January in Las Vegas in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest CE show in the world. See http://www.ieee-ccnc.org for details. If you decide to submit a paper to CCNC 2011 it will also be considered for a 2011 edition of this series in IEEE Communications Magazine.
BIOGRAPHIES MARIO KOLBERG [SM] (
[email protected]) is a lecturer within the Department of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling. His research interests include peer-to-peer overlay networks, home automation, and IP telephony. He led a project funded by Panasonic (USA) investigating efficiency gains in structured peer-to-peer overlays. He is the academic
IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2010
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GUEST EDITORIAL supervisor in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership focusing on developing a peer-to-peer overlay for mobile handsets. He is working in the ESRC project Interlife where he is working on using peer-to-peer networks with 3D virtual worlds in an educational context. He is also involved in the MATCH project, focusing on integrating different network technologies for care in the home. He is on the Editorial Board of the Springer journal Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications and has a long-standing involvement with the IEEE CCNC series. He is serving as its TPC Chair for its January 2011 running. He is a member of a number of international conferences’ program committees on networking and communications. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom. MADJID MERABTI [M] (
[email protected]) is a professor of networked systems and director of the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. He holds a Ph.D. from Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He has over 20 years’ experience in conducting research and teaching in the areas of computer networks (fixed and wireless), mobile computing, and computer network security. He is widely published, with over 150 publications in these areas, and leads the Distributed Multimedia Systems and Security Research Group, which has a number of U.K. government, EU, and industry supported research projects. He is principal investigator in a number of current projects in mobile networks security and privacy architectures and protocols, secure component composition in ubiquitous personal networks, networked appliances, mobile and ad hoc computing environments, sensor networks, and computer games technology. He is Co-Editor in-Chief of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, a member of the Editorial Board for Wiley’s Network
Security Journal, the Springer Peer-to-Peer Communications journal, and the International Journal on Computer Communications. He was Guest Editor for the Special issue on “Research Developments in Consumer Communications and Networking,” Multimedia Tools and Applications: An International Journal, Kluwer, September 2005. He is Technical Program Co-Chair for IEEE ICC 2009 — Symposium on Selected Areas in Communications and a member of the Steering Committee for IEEE CCNC. He has acted as TPC Chair for a number of international conferences, including the 5th IEEE Workshop on Networked Appliances, Liverpool, United Kingdom, October 2002. He is a member of a number of international conferences program committees on networking, security, and computer entertainment. STAN MOYER [SM] (
[email protected]) is executive director and strategic research program manager in the Applied Research area of Telcordia Technologies, where he has worked since 1990. Currently, he is also leading a business development effort for end-user information privacy protection for mobile services. In the past he has led research and business development activities related to digital content services and home networking. On these and other topics, he has been a frequent speaker at events such as IEEE CCNC, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Broadband Home conferences, IEEE ICC, and other technical workshops. Prior to that he worked on ATM switch hardware, broadband network architectures and protocols, middleware, Internet network and application security, Internet QoS, and voice over IP. He is currently President of the OSGi™ Alliance. He is a member of the board and Director — Marketing & Industry Relations for the IEEE Communications Society, Vice-Chair of the IEEE CCNC steering committee, and a past member of the IEEE Technical Activities Board Finance Committee.
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