Mobile Infrastructure Research Articles

Manifest Destiny in Southeast Asia: Archaeology of American Colonial Industry in the Philippines, 1898–1987

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, American logging companies backed by the US colonial regime initiated extensive extraction in Bikol, Philippines. Industrial infrastructure and the involvement of a newly assembled Bikolano workforce left a profound imprint on the region's landscape. This article discusses a collaborative archaeological project that used archival materials, place-name analysis, ethnographic interviews, discussions with local scholars, satellite mapping, and drone-mounted lidar scans of former industrial sites. Findings shed light on the enduring ramifications of American logging in the early 1900s on settlement patterns, the infrastructure of routes and mobility, the state of industries from Philippine independence in 1946 through the 1980s, and ongoing environmental hazards. These findings emphasize the legacy of American empire, reveal the role of Filipino logging workers in shaping the landscape through settlement decisions, and uncover intricate connections across a pan-Pacific American colonial frontier that was shaped by both extractive and settler colonialism. This article adds to an emerging trend in Americanist archaeology in which archaeology investigates recent historical and even contemporary events.

Usos insurgentes nas arquiteturas do trânsito: atuações como plano, truque e finta

Abstract The traffic condition is a common phenomenon for peripheral populations of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro. By forming a 'compulsory collective space', mobility infrastructures have enormous political and social potential. Certain 'insurgent' practices of groups that use the 'architectural loopholes' of these infrastructures stimulate this potential. This article analyzes some cultural, political, and economic uses connected to transit infrastructures according to three ways of designing (plan, trick, and feint) to discuss how architecture and urban planning can combine to build less unequal realities. Commercial uses around the Pavuna subway station, and political and cultural uses of Cine Taquara (BRT), Viaduto de Realengo, and Viaduto Negrão de Lima (Madureira) are analyzed.

How do SUMPs Consider Factors Influencing Walkability and Cyclability? A Review of Literature and Planning Tools

Improving active mobility in settlements is one of the EU's core objectives to improve people's quality of life. EU guidelines indicate Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) as strategic planning tools to achieve sustainable results through the definition of objectives and the provision of actions. Scientific research has extensively explored numerous factors in the built environment and active mobility infrastructures that influence mobility features and demands. However, a gap exists between research and urban plans employed to promote sustainable mobility. This paper examines whether these identified factors from scientific literature have implications for enhancing active mobility actions in Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. First, a literature review highlights recurring factors in assessing active mobility networks. Then, an overview of actions supporting walkability and cyclability within Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans applied in the Emilia-Romagna Region in Italy is conducted. The two reviews comparison points out the expected implementation gap between research and practice.

Walkability index for world heritage cities in developing countries

Walkability principles are an important part in the planning process of cities that face urban problems such as gentrification, pollution, and decay of their built heritage. The proposed factors – connectivity, proximity, land use mix, and retail density – form a comprehensive framework for evaluating walkability that transcends the boundaries of historical cities. These factors, while initially identified within historical contexts, possess inherent qualities that render them universally adaptable to various urban landscapes. By leveraging these factors, urban planners gain insights into the intricate fabric of pedestrian experiences in cities. They serve as universal evaluative tools, applicable not only to historical cities but also to burgeoning metropolises and smaller urban centres. This work introduces a novel approach to assessing the Walkability Index for World Heritage Cities, utilizing a Multiple Criteria Spatial Decision Support System (GIS-MCDA) structured in four stages. The approached methodology is particularly valuable for governments and decision-makers in developing countries of the Global South, where limitations in data and available tools are common challenges. The insights gained from this study can guide the improvement of policies, enable more precise implementation of sustainable mobility infrastructure, and motivate the pursuit or maintenance of UNESCO World Heritage nominations. The case study focused on the Historical Centre of Arequipa, Peru, a city designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in such contexts, owing to its specificity and the integration of both objective and subjective elements.

(Im)mobility infrastructure: a 21st-century dystopia?

ABSTRACT Based on the contributions in the special issue on Infrastructures and (Im)mobile Lives and the author’s observations about changes in global mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article proposes to broaden the concept of migration infrastructure into (im)mobility infrastructure. While migration infrastructure coordinates international migration, (im)mobility infrastructure manages people’s physical movement, both over long distance and on a daily basis, partly through the redistribution of mobility across types and populations. Mobility and immobility become deeply entwined. (Im)mobility infrastructure is important for building social resilience against crises such as pandemics, but can seriously undermine citizen rights.

Mobile infrastructure quality, regulatory quality, government effectiveness: Does e‐government development matter?

AbstractThere is a great deal of interest in how mobile infrastructure quality, regulatory quality, and a nation's capacity to develop efficient e‐government systems affect government effectiveness. The literature ignores the part electronic government plays in either the regulatory quality‐government effectiveness or mobile infrastructure quality‐government effectiveness nexuses, despite the fact that existing research indicates that the effects of these factors on government effectiveness vary across nations. Secondary data for 52 African nations was extracted from World Governance Indicator (WGI), Mobile Connectivity Index (MCI), and United Nations E‐government Database to empirically investigate the mediating relationship of e‐governments using hypothesized model. The positivist paradigm is considered appropriate for this study because it focuses on validating and testing a hypothesized model. The results show a significant relationship between mobile infrastructure quality and e‐government development, regulatory quality and e‐government development, e‐government and government effectiveness. However, there was no significant relationship between mobile infrastructure quality and government effectiveness. Additionally, e‐government was found to mediate the relationship between regulatory quality and government effectiveness and the relationship between mobile infrastructure quality and government effectiveness. This suggests that government effectiveness is enhanced when a country is able to develop and implement a good electronic system. The successful implementation of e‐governance practices offers better delivery of services to citizens, improved interactions with business, citizen empowerment through access to information, greater convenience, and cost reductions. In addition, establishing protections and legal reforms will be needed to ensure, among other things, the privacy, security and legal recognition of electronic interactions and electronic signatures.

From Lima to Canton and Beyond: Mobile and Digital Research Infrastructure for Closing the Gap Between Resource-rich and Resource-poor Organisations

ABSTRACT Access to research infrastructure for heritage science is the best way of narrowing the collections knowledge gap between resource-rich and resource-poor cultural institutions. Here we demonstrate a novel workflow that streamlines the use of a mobile laboratory for data collection (MOLAB) followed by a digital platform for data processing, analysis and interpretation (DIGILAB). The data collection and processing are taken care of by heritage science specialists, while the data analysis and interpretation can be performed collaboratively with conservators and curators. MOLAB with specialist personnel and mobile scientific instruments can sometimes be aided by in-house fixed laboratory (FIXLAB) equipment and personnel from resource-rich institutions to assist the resource-poor institutions if their collection can be hosted by the resource-rich institutions for analysis. The aim is to widen participation in the adoption of heritage science and material analysis in the understanding and conservation of collections, while ensuring high-quality, efficient and reliable data acquisition, processing, analysis and interpretation. The approach taken in this project combines access to various research infrastructure platforms to achieve extra benefit through adding further expert-assisted data analysis and interpretation capabilities, enabled by a new digital platform for data processing and visualisation.

Disparities of potential and perceived access to socioeconomic activities in informal urban communities in Kumasi-Ghana and Dar es Salaam-Tanzania

ABSTRACT Informal urban communities (IUCs) in sub-Saharan Africa constitute some two-thirds of SSA cities. IUCs are often associated with lower-quality housing, low-income populations, low car ownership, and poor mobility infrastructure. As such, most IUC dwellers rely on shared mobility modes that are unsafe and inconvenient. The current study examines potential and perceived access in terms of travel distance and time to six selected socioeconomic activity types in selected IUCs in Kumasi-Ghana, and Dar es Salaam-Tanzania. This was underpinned by evaluating residents’ perception of ease of access to workplace in relation to demographics, neighborhood characteristics, transport services characteristics, and travel characteristics. The applied multinomial logistic regression identified factors relating to age, education, income, travel time, road condition, access to major roads, travel modes, community location, inclusivity, safety, and affordability as strong indicators to enhance travel experiences. Across all activity types, the potential travel time underestimates the perceived travel time by 133% in Kumasi-Ghana, and 50% in Dar es Salaam-Tanzania. The overall access to socioeconomic activities based on travel distance and times was found to be relatively more favorable in Kumasi-Ghana than those in Dar es Salaam-Tanzania.

Future-oriented Codesign Workshops as a Method of Empowering Citizens in Urban Infrastructure Development: A Capabilitarian Analysis

ABSTRACT Urban mobility infrastructures have a major impact on the everyday life of city residents. Not only their mobility, but also their health, enjoyment of life and development of lifestyle preferences are affected by them. However, inclusive participation in infrastructure planning processes is difficult to achieve. We explore a foresight approach that develops desirable urban visions that involve residents in the preparation of decisions that will impact their lives. We propose future-oriented co-design workshops for the operationalisation of a capabilitarian focus on conscientisation, conciliation and collaboration to involve citizens in the visioning of infrastructure planning. The study is based on future-oriented codesign workshops held in Montreal in 2022–2023. Residents were invited to evaluate and discuss various future scenarios that re-imagine a highway currently cutting through the city. The results show the capabilitarian co-design workshops to promote critical thinking, vision creation and to a lesser extent collaboration in the discussions triggered by the future-oriented codesign workshops. The results also reveal the difficulties of making such discussions truly inclusive, as well as their ambivalent relation to urban planning processes.

A Flexible Infrastructure-Sharing 5G Network Architecture Based on Network Slicing and Roaming

The sharing of mobile network infrastructure has become a key topic with the introduction of 5G due to the high costs of deploying such infrastructures, with neutral host models coupled with features such as network function virtualization (NFV) and network slicing emerging as viable solutions for the challenges in this area. With this in mind, this work presents the design, implementation, and test of a flexible infrastructure-sharing 5G network architecture capable of providing services to any type of client, whether an operator or not. The proposed architecture leverages 5G’s network slicing for traffic isolation and compliance with the policies of different clients, with roaming employed for the authentication of users of operator clients. The proposed architecture was implemented and tested in a simulation environment using the UERANSIM and Open5GS open-source tools. Qualitative tests successfully validated the authentication and the traffic isolation features provided by the slices for the two types of clients. Results also demonstrate that the proposed architecture has a positive impact on the performance of the neutral host network infrastructure, achieving 61.8%-higher throughput and 96.8%-lower packet loss ratio (PLR) in a scenario sharing the infrastructure among four clients and eight users when compared to a single client with all the network resources.

EFL Teachers’ Attitudes towards Mobile Teaching Affordances: A Mokken Scale Analysis

In contemporary education settings, the expeditious advancement of mobile devices, wireless communications and network infrastructures has emerged as a crucial issue. Although mobile technology capabilities and affordances have attracted considerable attention, there is a lack of a valid scale for evaluating mobile teaching affordances. Therefore, this research sought to develop and validate a 36-item inventory of mobile teaching affordances. To accomplish this objective, 204 EFL teachers in this research utilising the convenience sampling method. The data was analysed using the Mokken scale analysis. The study results indicated that 10 out of 36 items should be deleted to optimise the utilisation of the data. Consequently, the study created a valid and reliable 26-item inventory that could be used to measure mobile teaching affordance in EFL or ESL teaching contexts. The research findings suggested that the newly created scale is an invaluable instrument for evaluating the perspectives of EFL teachers regarding the potential benefits of mobile teaching. Furthermore, it can effectively pinpoint areas where teachers may require further development in their understanding of and proficiency in utilising mobile teaching methods. These revelations can also act as a basis for developing instructional programmes aimed at empowering EFL teachers to seamlessly incorporate mobile devices into their pedagogical approaches, thereby enhancing their overall effectiveness. The study’s findings can be used by teachers, learners and researchers in educational systems.

Enhancement of fuel cell based energy sustainability for cell on wheels mobile base stations used in disaster areas

In disaster areas, Cells on Wheels (COW) mobile infrastructures are one of the most widely used solutions to restore communications lost due to power grid collapse or physical damage. The biggest problem with such systems is the low operating time and the inability to ensure energy continuity due to logistical problems.In this proposed study, the solution to the stated problem is focused on, and the use of hydrogen, which is the most important energy option of the future, is proposed as an innovative approach. The PV-hydrogen/fuel cell hybrid energy generation and storage system ensures the continuity of energy required for COW. In this study, the system is analyzed under realistic conditions using radiation and temperature data from different seasons in the disaster area. The energy needed in the proposed system is provided by PV and fuel cell with a control strategy. In addition, the electrolyser in the system contributes to the continuity of the energy by producing hydrogen with the excess energy provided by the PV. COW mobile infrastructures, which have a working time of 3 h under normal conditions, have been provided with energy continuity throughout the day thanks to the proposed system. As a result, this study has revealed that it is a solution to an important problem, especially in disaster areas where information flow is very critical.

Hybrid Wi-Fi and PLC network for efficient e-health communication in hospitals: a prototype

E-health is being adapted in modern hospitals as a significant addition to the existing healthcare services. To this end, modern hospitals urgently require a mobile, high-capacity, secure, and cost-effective communication infrastructure. In this paper, we explore potential applications of a hybrid broadband power line communication (PLC) and Wi-Fi in an indoor hospital scenario. It utilizes the existing power line cables and Wi-Fi plug-and-play devices for indoor broadband communication. Broadband power line (BPL) adaptors with Wi-Fi outputs are used to build an access network in hospitals, particularly in areas where the wireless router signal is poor. The Tenda PH10 AV1,000 AC Wi-Fi power line adapter is a set of BPL adapters that offer operational bandwidth of up to 1,000 Mbps. These adapters are based on the HomePlug AV2 protocol and can provide a data rate up to 200 Mbps on the physical layer. An experiment using the PLC Wi-Fi kit is carried out to show that a Wi-Fi and PLC hybrid network is the best candidate to provide wide range of practical applications in a hospital including, but not limited to, telemedicine, electronic medical records, early-stage disease diagnosis, health management, real-time monitoring, and remote surgeries.

NEED ANALYSIS OF MOBILE LEARNING AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN INDONESIA: A BLIOMETRIC STUDY

This research examines the need for mobile learning at Indonesia's junior high school. Mobile learning is a learning approach that uses mobile devices and digital technology to support the learning process. This research aims to understand research trends related to mobile learning and the need for mobile learning in Indonesian junior high schools. This research uses bibliometric analysis to evaluate mobile learning research trends in Indonesian junior high schools. Bibliometric analysis involves collecting and analyzing relevant bibliographic data or scientific publications. The research uses four application tools. First, Publish or Perish was used to search for scientific articles by keyword, resulting in 752 articles. Then, through Mendeley, filtering was carried out based on specific criteria, resulting in 561 articles. Next, Covidence filtered articles in detail, resulting in 158 relevant articles. Finally,VOS viewer is used for data visualization with co-occurrences. The results of the bibliometric analysis show that research on mobile learning in Indonesian junior high schools has increased significantly since 2020. Various disciplines are involved in mobile learning research, primarily focusing on mathematics, science, and language education. Apart from that, the field of information technology also has a vital role in developing mobile learning applications and infrastructure. This research provides an objective view of research trends and mobile learning needs in Indonesian middle schools, provides direction for further research, and supports the development of more innovative and inclusive education in the future.

Ukraine’s post-war recovery program as a basis for the development of electric vehicles and electric infrastructure

The article is devoted to the determination of the development of domestic electric vehicle transport and electric vehicle infrastructure on the basis of such an economic and legal instrument as the post-war recovery program of Ukraine, taking into account EU approaches in the legal regulation of decarbonization of the transport sector. The European Commission adopted the Communiqué to the European Parliament, the European Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions «Assistance and Reconstruction of Ukraine» on 18.05.2022, where the provision of funds for the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine is conditioned by our country’s compliance with current European policies and standards, one of which there is decarbonization. Therefore, Ukraine should carry out post-war reconstruction taking into account the experience and approaches outlined by the international acts of the EU. The National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the Consequences of the War, a consultative and advisory body under the President of Ukraine, proposed a draft Plan for the Recovery of Ukraine. Based on the analysis of the provisions of the project component of the Recovery Plan of Ukraine «Restoration and development of infrastructure». It was concluded that the project of the Recovery Plan of Ukraine and its component «Recovery and development of infrastructure» is an economic and legal instrument of a programmatic nature. It establishes a systematic approach to the more active use of electric vehicles and the development of electric charging stations. The plan defines short-term, medium-term and strategic tasks for the development of electric mobility infrastructure. The general program approaches defined in this act correspond to the directions established by the normative legal acts that were adopted to regulate the issues of environmentalization of the domestic transport sector before the war, as well as the general directions of the development of the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles, outlined by the international acts adopted in the EU. The disadvantage is that a complete transition to electric transport for the transportation of passengers on urban and suburban routes is foreseen in the medium term, which is an extremely limited period. In the Plan, it is expedient to use the objective indicators of the development of the system of electric filling stations, which are established in the domestic regulatory and technical acts. Also, the directions of the development of electric transport and the network of electric gas stations should be reflected in the programs of comprehensive restoration of the region, the territory of the territorial community.

A Vehicle-Edge-Cloud Framework for Computational Analysis of a Fine-Tuned Deep Learning Model.

The cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) infrastructure plays a key role in understanding and enhancing the environmental perception of autonomous vehicles (AVs) driving in complex urban settings. However, the deployment of CCAM infrastructure necessitates the efficient selection of the computational processing layer and deployment of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to achieve greater performance of AVs in complex urban environments. In this paper, we propose a computational framework and analyze the effectiveness of a custom-trained DL model (YOLOv8) when deployed in diverse devices and settings at the vehicle-edge-cloud-layered architecture. Our main focus is to understand the interplay and relationship between the DL model's accuracy and execution time during deployment at the layered framework. Therefore, we investigate the trade-offs between accuracy and time by the deployment process of the YOLOv8 model over each layer of the computational framework. We consider the CCAM infrastructures, i.e., sensory devices, computation, and communication at each layer. The findings reveal that the performance metrics results (e.g., 0.842 mAP@0.5) of deployed DL models remain consistent regardless of the device type across any layer of the framework. However, we observe that inference times for object detection tasks tend to decrease when the DL model is subjected to different environmental conditions. For instance, the Jetson AGX (non-GPU) outperforms the Raspberry Pi (non-GPU) by reducing inference time by 72%, whereas the Jetson AGX Xavier (GPU) outperforms the Jetson AGX ARMv8 (non-GPU) by reducing inference time by 90%. A complete average time comparison analysis for the transfer time, preprocess time, and total time of devices Apple M2 Max, Intel Xeon, Tesla T4, NVIDIA A100, Tesla V100, etc., is provided in the paper. Our findings direct the researchers and practitioners to select the most appropriate device type and environment for the deployment of DL models required for production.

On Pedestrian Accessibility: Spatial Justice and Progressive Planning in African Cities

Africa is predicted to be the fastest urbanizing continent over the next century, with its primary and secondary cities expected to experience rapid growth. On the continent, over 70 percent of daily trips are made by walking. Yet, pedestrian-friendly city spaces remain underexplored in research on Africa as city planning regimes continue a long-established trend of prioritizing vehicular mobility. In response to this knowledge gap, and with the recent increased scholarly focus on spatial justice in African cities, we argue that it is essential to prioritize pedestrian accessibility within them. In this paper, we highlight vulnerable urban populations who are impacted by exclusive urban planning design and policies by focusing on children, women working in informal economies, and older adults. We conduct a critical literature review of the history and patterns of urban (spatial) planning on the continent, as well as mobility and transport infrastructure in African cities. We then outline a forward-looking section that assesses effective urban planning proposals relating to mobility and African urban development, as we consider how urban interventions can be applied to address the needs of vulnerable urban populations. Finally, we link the theoretical and applied components of the paper to scholarly discussions of spatial justice and articulate the progressive possibilities of African urban futures as central to future city development. We conclude with research directions on pedestrian accessibility and spatial justice in African urban planning agenda.

GNSS/5G Joint Position Based on Weighted Robust Iterative Kalman Filter

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is widely used for its high accuracy, wide coverage, and strong real-time performance. However, limited by the navigation signal mechanism, satellite signals in urban canyons, bridges, tunnels, and other environments are seriously affected by non-line-of-sight and multipath effects, which greatly reduce positioning accuracy and positioning continuity. In order to meet the positioning requirements of human and vehicle navigation in complex environments, it was necessary to carry out this research on the integration of multiple signal sources. The Fifth Generation (5G) signal possesses key attributes, such as low latency, high bandwidth, and substantial capacity. Simultaneously, 5G Base Stations (BSs), serving as a fundamental mobile communication infrastructure, extend their coverage into areas traditionally challenging for GNSS technology, including indoor environments, tunnels, and urban canyons. Based on the actual needs, this paper proposes a system algorithm based on 5G and GNSS joint positioning, aiming at the situation that the User Equipment (UE) only establishes the connection with the 5G base station with the strongest signal. Considering the inherent nonlinear problem of user position and angle measurements in 5G observation, an angle cosine solution is proposed. Furthermore, enhancements to the Sage–Husa Adaptive Kalman Filter (SHAKF) algorithm are introduced to tackle issues related to observation weight distribution and adaptive updates of observation noise in multi-system joint positioning, particularly when there is a lack of prior information. This paper also introduces dual gross error detection adaptive correction of the forgetting factor based on innovation in the iterative Kalman filter to enhance accuracy and robustness. Finally, a series of simulation experiments and semi-physical experiments were conducted. The numerical results show that compared with the traditional method, the angle cosine method reduces the average number of iterations from 9.17 to 3 with higher accuracy, which greatly improves the efficiency of the algorithm. Meanwhile, compared with the standard Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), the proposed algorithm improved 48.66%, 35.17%, and 38.23% at 1σ/2σ/3σ, respectively.

Recalcitrant Lifeworlds

This article analyzes how a failed rubber crop from the plantations of British India became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous ecologies in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. While a growing scholarship focuses on plants that became profitable within plantation histories, this article instead shows that failed commodity crops like Ficus elastica, locally known as Jri Bamon in Meghalaya, India, exhibited recalcitrance to a range of state and scientific regimes. In an argument that disrupts the European-centered narrative about the triumphant expansion of knowledge and territory, the author introduces “recalcitrance” as an interspecies co-laboring between humans and plants, unknowable through botanical and capitalist practices emerging in a colonial context. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article first studies the nineteenth-century colonial frontier in Assam in British India, where Jri Bamon was molded as a rubber crop in the plantation regimes. Second, it studies the present-day Indigenous ecologies of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, near India’s international border with Bangladesh, where this tree is historically grown as an infrastructure of mobility, called the living root bridge. The recalcitrant materiality of Jri Bamon surfaces through each of these human-plant encounters, providing pathways for those who would engage with it on its own terms.

GPU and VPU Enabled Virtual Mobile Infrastructure for 3-D Image Rendering and its Application in Telemedicine

GPU and VPU Enabled Virtual Mobile Infrastructure for 3-D Image Rendering and its Application in Telemedicine