Recent Patents on Telecommunication (Discontinued) - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

According to the ITU-T, Next Generation Networks (NGNs) are envisioned as IP-based networks capable of offering their users ubiquitous access to a multitude of feature rich, QoS-enabled, broadband services that combine telecom and datacom flavors. As NGNs continue to evolve, several challenges related to their operation and architecture are being investigated. One of these challenges is the enabling of innovative and personalized “killer” applications that would appeal to users and increase network operators’ revenues. Another challenge consists in the support of advanced QoS schemes that would take into consideration users’ needs and the network situation to manage the network resources in an efficient and adaptive manner. Context-awareness implies the ability to use contextual (or situational) information to provide relevant information and-or services to the user. The introduction of the context-awareness concept in NGNs could open the door to personalized, adaptive killer applications as well as context-aware dynamic QoS schemes. This paper surveys the literature on contextual information acquisition and management solutions-patents that were proposed for IP-based networks, evaluates their suitability with respect to context-awareness’ integration in NGNs, and discusses research directions. Among the evaluated solutions and patents, the 3GPP presence framework shows signification potential for context-awareness’ integration in NGNs. However, several open issues remain unsolved, such as: the definition of a standard and unified interface enabling the interaction with heterogeneous sensors; the definition of an expressive information model enabling the representation of a wide range of contextual information captured by physical-logical-mobile sensors; the usage of complementary approaches such as mobile and participatory sensing to achieve better processing capabilities on sensor nodes; and the definition of suitable business models and support functions regulating the interaction between sensors and NGNs.

Internet connects millions of computers from around the world and provides communication, storage and high speed computation infrastructure. As such Computer Networks has emerged as one of the most important technological field of our time. Users are joining the internet from every nook and corner of the world and utilising its services in all fields including education and business. Networking devices provide the infrastructure to these different institutions joining the internet world, with a reasonably high investment. As a result high cost of networking devices and their enterprise oriented design limits their usage to big institutions. These devices are also less flexible as their configuration and functionalities are designed to suit the big players of the industry. This method transforms Personal Computer into Networking Devices (PCIND) used in computer networks. The invention serves as various networking devices as and when required and is therefore a cost effective way of utilizing the benefits of computer networking. Overall it serves as a cheap alternative to the networking devices with the flexibility to configure and install the system according to local needs. This paper is based on a patent and is organized into four parts, viz a method to turn a PC into Router, a Server, a Wireless Access Point and a Bridge-Gateway-Firewall. The main features of the patent are given and also the working of the method.

Mashup service is common in the realm of web development. Mashup, generally, is a web page that sources two or more data sources to create a new and an improved service. While mashup service is a common phenomenon in the web development scenario, there is no such mashup for services that are based on voice user interface in the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. IVR based telephony services have been popular because they are an easy and a convenient means to inquire, seek information or book services. At the same time frequently used service, like taxi usually has multiple service operators. Though the Same Service is provided by Multiple Operators (SSMO) to the end user, their access points are different and require the user to choose a particular service operator to call. Unlike a web portal or a web mashup, there is no way for the user to comparatively and simultaneously check the offerings from SSMO and choose the best among them. This paper describes a novel approach, based on a recent patent, to create a mashup service by integrating two or more IVR services.

Internet can be seen as an ever-changing platform where new types of services and applications are constantly emerging. Consequently, novel communications paradigms are continuously appearing, generating traffic with different network requirements. Besides, the emergence of highly stealth attacks leads to an increasing need of accurately profiling Internet services, by mapping their traffic to the originating application, in order to improve network management tasks such as resources optimization, network performance, service personalization and security. However, building such profiles is a highly complex task due to the inherent complexity of network protocols and to the multiple restrictions that prevent or limit the analysis of the generated traffic. Therefore, novel traffic identification methodologies are needed to provide accurate traffic classification and user profiling. In this work, we review some the most relevant traffic classification methodologies that have been published so far, including some recent patents. Then, the paper proposes new classification methodologies that, by analyzing the dynamics of captured Internet traffic, can accurately discriminate the different frequency components generated by diverse licit and illicit Internet applications. In this way, different signatures can be built for each application class, enabling its accurate classification whether if belongs to licit applications or to stealth Internet threats.

This paper presents a patent targeted to obtain distance measurements between nodes belonging to a wireless network. The main motivation for this patent is the measurement of the distance between a user device and an access point (or base station). After several distance measurements to different access points at sight and assuming the position of the access points known, the device can compute its own position by trilateration. The main advantage in front of previously existing methods to obtain distance measurements is that the method presented here involves only software modifications to legacy terminals, thus allowing avoiding the need for hardware modifications at the user terminal.

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network represents a system of wireless mobile nodes that can freely and dynamically selforganize into arbitrary and temporary network topologies, allowing people and devices to seamlessly communicate without any pre-existing communication architecture. The growth of real time multimedia application in such environments, has drawn a lot of attention to wireless networks that support quality of service (QoS). In this work, the QoS metrics, delay and link life time (LLT) of the path are dynamically calculated. Based on these values the routing decisions are made. Here the multipath routing protocol is taken as the base protocol. The proposed algorithm finds the multiple QoS routes only, based on the QoS metrics and stores only those paths in the routing table. The route is selected based on the integrated QoS metric and is used to transmit the data. The base protocol used is multipath AODV(Ad Hoc On demand Distance Vector ) routing protocol. The proposed protocol may take extra time during route discovery process to compute the additional QoS parameters, but this time is compensated by having only QoS paths for data transmission. A few patents on the QoS Routing for MANETS have been reviewed.The simulator NS-2.34 is used to simulate and compare the performance of the protocols in terms of the QoS metrics such as end-to-end delay, PDR in the MANET.

Automatic personal identification is playing an important role in secure and reliable applications, such as access control, surveillance systems, information systems, physical buildings and many more applications. In contrast with traditional approaches, based on what a person knows (password) or what a person has (tokens), biometric based identification is providing an improved security for their users. Biometrics is the measurement of physiological traits such as palmprints, fingerprints, iris etc., and/or behavioral traits such as gait, signature etc., of an individual person for personal recognition. Hand-based person identification provides a good user acceptance, distinctiveness, universality, relatively easy to capture and low-cost. However, Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP), which provides different information from a variety of finger types, has been recently used to improve the performance of hand-based biometric identification because each finger has a specific feature, making it possible to collect more information to improve the accuracy of hand-based biometric systems. In this paper, we presented an efficient online personal identification based on FKP using the twodimensional Block based Discrete Cosine Transform (2D-BDCT) and MultiVariate Normal density function (MVN). In this study, a segmented FKP is firstly divided into non-overlapping and equal-sized blocks, and then, applies the 2DBDCT over each block. By using zig-zag scan order, each transform block is reordered to produce the feature vector. Subsequently, we use the MVN for modeling the feature vector of each FKP. Finally, Log-likelihood scores are used for FKP matching. Finally, performance of all finger types is determined individually and several fusion rules are applied to develop a multimodal system based on fusion at the matching score level. Experimental results show that FKPs modalities show best performance for identifying a person as they provide an excellent identification rate and with more security. Here we also discuss few patents that are relevant to the article.