Legacy Solutions Research Articles

ERP Systems Functionalities in Higher Education

Abstract The educational ERP of business activities in higher education go through a different modules. ERP in higher education should respond the real requirements of education system. Enhancements or mere adaptations of legacy solutions, which stemmed from the experience in business practice, are not always successful. The current paper shows the contents of the ERP that serve the education system successfully also shows the needs and future expectations of higher education institutions and the current business oriented ERP system.

Towards sustainable urban water management: A critical reassessment

Within the literature, concerns have been raised that centralised urban water systems are maladapted to challenges associated with climate change, population growth and other socio-economic and environmental strains. This paper provides a critical assessment of the discourse that surrounds emerging approaches to urban water management and infrastructure provision. As such, ‘sustainable urban water management’ (SUWM) concepts are scrutinized to highlight the limitations and strengths in the current lines of argument and point towards unaddressed complexities in the transformational agendas advocated by SUWM proponents. Taking an explicit infrastructure view, it is shown that the specific context of the urban water sector means that changes to infrastructure systems occur as an incremental hybridisation process. This process is driven by a range of factors including lock-in effects of legacy solutions, normative values and vested interests of agents, cost and performance certainty and perceptions of risk. Different views of these factors help explain why transformational agendas have not achieved the change SUWM proponents call for and point to the need for a critical reassessment of the system effects and economics of alternative service provision models.

Enhancing java call control with media server control functions

In this paper, we propose a novel abstraction layer for application service implementation compliant with the Java Call Control (JCC) specifications. It simplifies creation of multimedia services using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). In order to show its effectiveness, we have implemented a JCC Resource Adaptor for a JAIN Service Logic Execution Environment (JSLEE), using the Mobicents application server, which is the only existing open source JSLEE implementation. Experimental results, obtained by implementing a complex VoIP service, show both a significant simplification of service implementation and improved performance over legacy solutions.

Metrics and QoE assessment in P2PTV applications

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a growing technology offering an affordable platform to deploy distributed services and streaming of multimedia content through peer-to-peer television (P2PTV). Nevertheless, to promote such technology it is necessary to provide a solid streaming quality assessment mechanism. In this context, legacy solutions tied to service level agreements are no longer suitable, as for P2P systems, the service consumers become an active part by assisting in the service delivery. To overcome this limitation, we present a generic multi-layer monitoring and management framework to assess the quality of service (QoS) and the quality of experience (QoE) of multimedia traffic in any P2PTV streaming application. We also demonstrate the usefulness of our solution, by analysing the performance of a real streaming application in a P2PTV environment.

Secure Service Discovery Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks Using Hash Function

Ad-hoc networks, mobile devices communicate via wireless links without the aid of any fixed networking infrastructure. These devices must be able to discover services dynamically and share them safely, taking into account ad-hoc networks requirements such as limited processing and communication power, decentralized management, and dynamic network topology, among others. Legacy solutions fail in addressing these requirements. In this paper, we propose a service discovery protocol with security features, the Secure Pervasive Discovery Protocol. SPDP h is a fully distributed protocol in which services offered by devices can be discovered by others, without a central server. It is based on One Way hash Chains, as well as protection of confidential information, secure communications, or access control and compared this with Pervasive Discovery Protocol PDP.

Millimeter-Wave Radio-Over-Fiber System Based on Heterodyned Unlocked Light Sources and Self-Homodyned RF Receiver

A millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radio-over-fiber (RoF) system based on unlocked heterodyned light sources and self-homodyned RF receiver is proposed and demonstrated. Since the mm-wave signal is generated through the beating of two independent optical signals at the photodetector, complexities of the generation and distribution of mm-wave signal in the optical domain are avoided. Also, as RF self-homodyning is used as the means of recovering the baseband signal, phase-noise effects due to unlocking of the light sources are avoided. Experimental results confirm that the combination of these legacy solutions can successfully avoid most of the high-speed electrooptic and RF devices both from the central station (CS) and base stations (BSs).

A novel low‐power RF4CE‐based communication framework for multimedia system control

SUMMARYA remote control (RC) is a component that operates electronic devices wirelessly issuing commands to consumer electronics (CE). Such existing RC solutions are based mainly on the infrared radiation (IR) technology with a line‐of‐sight barrier and they lack various additional features such as bi‐directional and richer communications, low‐power consumption, and no line‐of‐sight barriers which are needed for the flexibility and interoperability of more intelligent new CE devices on the market. In this paper, we propose a novel low‐power RF4CE‐based communication framework (RCF) for Multimedia System Control in order to overcome many constraints of IR‐based legacy solutions and support energy‐efficient multimedia communications. The proposed RCF framework is designed for multimedia control communication using smart phones, adopting the RF4CE protocol which is a de facto radio frequency standard for CE remote control solutions. The analysis of energy consumption and two verification scenarios (one for CE control and the other for contents sharing), including the use of various CEs and smart phones, show that our proposed RCF framework provides good practical usage in terms of content‐sharing and smart CE control. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A novel approach to user data federation in Next‐Generation Networks

AbstractUser Profile Management (UPM) is an essential feature to support applications in Next‐Generation Network (NGN). Its actual realization depends on standardization of information and preferences and the ways in which user data are expressed and handled. To this end, an NGN may support different approaches; among them, the ‘federated approach’ seems particularly relevant, as it fits the very common scenario in which many existing services and devices already contain specific settings and preferences that are however unrelated to any other. This paper proposes a novel, totally distributed solution for data federation, where authorization, management of data localization and synchronization of federated data are thought to be part of the meta information that may be associated with each data element, rather than being external resources or built‐in functions, as in legacy solutions. First, the present paper introduces the work on personalization and UPM and the NGN architecture being done at ETSI. Then, the paper illustratesthe work on user data interoperability performed at OASIS XDI TC. Finally, based on these inputs, it explains how to combine them into a novel solution (which is not part of ETSI or OASIS specifications). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.