SLA-driven predictive orchestration for distributed cloud-based mobile services

We describe a system for performing SLA-driven management and orchestration of distributed infrastructures composed of services supporting mobile computing use cases. In particular, we focus on a Follow-Me Cloud scenario in which we consider mobile users accessing cloud-enable services. We combine a SLA-driven approach to infrastructure optimization, with forecast-based performance degradation preventive actions and pattern detection for supporting mobile cloud infrastructure management. We present our system's information model and architecture including the algorithmic support and the proposed scenarios for system evaluation.

The German business and information technologies project

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006. The key results are as follows: • The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification. • IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years. • The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market. • The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context. • The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries. • Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising. • The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online. • Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means. • Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

The Changing Environment of Audiovisual Media. New Technologies, New Patterns of Consumer/Business Behaviour and Their Implications for Audiovisual Media Regulation

Digital TV offers of 200 channels and 500 video-on-demand films, podcasting, mobile television, a new web blog being created every two seconds - these are some of the factual elements depicting contemporary audiovisual media in the digital environment. The present article looks into some of these technological advances and sketches their implications for the markets of media content, in particular as newly emerging patterns of consumer and business behaviour are concerned. Ultimately, it puts forward the question of whether the existing audiovisual media regulatory models, which are still predominantly analogue-based, have been rendered obsolete by the transformed (and continually transforming) digital environment.

Load Balancing in LTE Mobile Networks with Information-Centric Networking

Mobile networks usage rapidly increased over the years, with great consequences in terms of performance requirements. In this paper, we propose mechanisms to use Information-Centric Networking to perform load balancing in mobile networks, providing content delivery over multiple radio technologies at the same time and thus efficiently using resources and improving the overall performance of content transfer. Meaningful results were obtained by comparing content transfer over single radio links with typical strategies to content transfer over multiple radio links with Information-Centric Networking load balancing. Results demonstrate that Information-Centric Networking load balancing increases the performance and efficiency of 3GPP Long Term Evolution mobile networks while greatly improving the network perceived quality for end users.