Mobile TV services are expected to become a key application in future wireless networks. The recently proposed terrestrial digital broadcast technology, DVB-H, especially designed for mobile services, is regarded as a powerful alternative to the 3G cellular networks that already offer these services but on a point-to-point basis. Unfortunately, the cost of supporting real-time streaming and full area coverage seems to be very high compared to fixed

High demand for mobile Internet services and interactive services are expected to characterize the user of the future wireless systems. For a large number of applications the user terminal will have to receive massive amount of information while sending only a few data. Exploiting this fact in the infrastructure design may have significant implications on the deployment cost of the infrastructure since higher powers can be used at the transmitting

In the Ambient Networks perspective of “Beyond 3G” scenarios characterized by the cooperation between heterogeneous networks consisting of different Radio Access Technologies, and from a radio resource management viewpoint, this paper defines a framework for future research in the field of multicast/broadcast service provisioning. In particular, multicast/broadcast services that are expected to arise in such scenarios are described, along with

This work tries to evaluate the user perceived performance in a wireless system based on sparse infrastructure (islands of coverage).We investigate a mobile user in a Manhattan environment and the considered service is web browsing. Data caching in the use terminal is employed in order to hide the discontinuities of coverage. We show that for this particular application, the user’s behavior of revisiting pages previously accessed makes caching

This article presents ongoing work on the problem of minimization of delivery cost per item for a given set of multimedia items, under the assumption that we have at our disposal a cellular and a broadcasting infrastructure covering the same service area. Only best effort traffic is considered. The center of our investigations is a generic mobile network operator. We consider two scenarios: the MNVO (Mobile Network Virtual Operator) and the Integrator

This article introduces a cost based framework for the resource management in hybrid cellular-broadcasting systems with adaptive data rate. The considered service is delivery of multimedia items to the cache memory of user terminals. The problem investigated here is the minimization of the delivery cost per item, given that we have at our disposal a cellular and a broadcasting system. The proposed solution is to search for optimum set of users that

One of the ways towards provision of low-cost mobile multimedia entertainment is to make possible the sharing of the wireless resources among multiple operators of different radio access technologies. Here we discuss opportunities for new system architectures enabled by sharing the resources belonging to the cellular and broadcasting systems, namely the spectrum and the infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to identify the bottlenecks of such

This paper investigates the feasibility of DVB-H deployment on existing wireless infrastructure for analogue/digital broadcasting and cellular systems. The considered strategies assume using only the broadcasting or cellular infrastructure separately and the case when both can be used jointly. The implementation strategies are compared in terms of required transmission power, achievable coverage and number of sites needed. Based on these figures,

The multi-radio access architecture within the ambient network concept opens up opportunities for new business roles within the mobile and wireless domain. The new business roles take advantage of the control plane functionality that enables cost efficient connectivity over heterogeneous radio access technologies.

This article investigates the scalability of DVBH deployment on existing wireless infrastructure for digital broadcasting and cellular networks. Three deployment strategies are investigated: when only the broadcasting and the cellular infrastructure are used separately, and the case when both can be used jointly. The outcomes show that, in general, the investment needed for increasing the service capacity by switching to higher order modulation,