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In many settings, the users are mobile (e.g. away from their desks) while high quality multimedia telephony equipment has fixed locations. This may result in unsuccessful multimedia calls and motivates a context aware system which supports session mobility. This paper aims to address these issues.

The approach is to utilize state‐of‐the‐art in‐context awareness and integrate this into a real time telecom system based on SIP. System requirements are formulated and the system is designed, implemented and (technically) tested.

The paper contains a thorough analysis of why baseline SIP and SIP REFER alone cannot solve our case and why a new SIP extension is introduced. The solution is evaluated and compared to solutions such as “virtual terminals”.

It is pointed out that the context model does not directly support roaming between two different business domains. This issue is however of limited impact in an enterprise setting. The current prototype is thoroughly tested from a technical viewpoint, but user studies in real organizations are recommended as further work.

The paper shows that human issues and issues relating to computer mediated communication (CMC) are strongly linked to technical details in SIP. In practice this means that researchers in CMC and CSCW should look more into building prototypes where real time conversational features are supported together with dynamic change of media types.

The main value of the paper is a thorough described technical realization of the context aware multimedia application ENriched MEdia (ENME). The background material and the appendix should be of value to anyone interested in convergence between computing and communication.

The purpose of this paper is to identify concerns developing in regard to current approaches used to define, deliver and fund universal service obligations (USOs) for telecommunications due to developments in competition, new technology, e.g. wireless, convergence and next generation networks (NGN), including voice over internet protocol (VoIP). To stimulate thinking about the policies required to deliver USOs in an IP‐enabled NGN environment.

The paper examines the nature and scope of USOs, including the concept of “functional internet access” to address questions about whether in an NGN environment: present USOs are sustainable; USOs need to change; and whether USOs should include access to broadband? The paper also examines alternative/complementary sources of funding for USOs.

With falling revenue (due to increasing competition and declining prices) occurring alongside strong demand for funds to deploy NGN, telecommunications operators are less able to provide USOs sustained by cross‐subsidisation. Universal service funds, too, may be under pressure. Also there is likely to be an uneven migration to NGN since it is likely that NGN will be deployed first in more profitable, densely populated areas and then only later (if at all) in relatively less commercially viable rural/remote areas. The paper concludes that present USOs can be maintained in an NGN environment. It concludes that since USOs is an evolving concept, there should be regular systematic reviews of whether USOs should be extended to include broadband. The paper concludes that increased funding from general taxation revenue is warranted and would link decisions concerning the nature and scope of USOs more closely with financial responsibility for such decisions.

The paper stimulates rethinking about whether, and if so how, arrangements relating to USOs need to change? In adopting a longer term perspective of universal services, the paper may be a valuable complement to the reviews of USOs being conducted in various countries (since short term decisions should be consistent with longer term developments).

The first purpose of this paper is to propose a scalable video coding scheme providing flexibility in video transmission, especially under wireless environment. The second purpose is to analyze the problem of lengthening the key frame interval in distributed video coding (DVC), and propose an approach to improve the rate‐distortion (RD) performance of DVC for long group‐of‐frames (GOF) size.

In the proposed scheme, a base layer is first obtained from an H.264 coder. When a DVC coder is then used to code the enhancement layer, information in processing the base layer is extracted and analyzed to make multiple side‐information available and reduce error accumulation for DVC coding, thus further improving the performance of the DVC coder.

By dividing video into base and enhancement layers, the combined video coding architecture enables a flexible video transmission. In addition, several methods are used to improve the RD performance in DVC coding. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms non‐scalable DVC for long GOF size.

Prediction from the decoding loop in base layer encoder largely reduces enhancement layer spatial redundancy. Multiple side‐information provides better estimation for DVC reconstruction. Long prediction loop is more reliable because error accumulation is effectively compensated.

This paper asks the reader to consider future information retrieval services that return multimedia documents containing any combination of text, graphics, still raster images, audio, and motion video in response to user queries. It then argues that the emergence of generally available multimedia information services depends on four things: (1) close to ubiquitous high‐bandwidth networks; (2) inexpensive user appliances capable of handling multimedia; (3) adoption of standards for representation, compression, packaging and transport of multimedia information; and (4) development of a corpus of multimedia information and associated infrastructure for organizing and searching it. After some explanation, it asserts that the first three are already happening and expresses reserved optimism about the fourth.

The purpose of this paper is to explore influential factors of global broadband adoption by examining adoption factors – such as platform competition, information and communication technology (ICT) use, content, broadband speed, income, population density, education, price, and local loop unbundling (LLU).

The paper examines influential factors of global broadband adoption; it also employs regression analysis and one‐way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance). A total of 110 observations were employed for multiple regression analysis and 159 observations were used for one‐way ANOVA.

The findings in the paper show that platform competition, LLU, broadband speed, information and communication technology use, and content contribute to global broadband adoption. The impacts of platform competition are strong when market share of dominant technology and non‐dominant technology is similar.

The main findings of this paper suggest policy and strategy implications to policy‐makers and broadband service providers. This is unsponsored research that adds to the growing scholarship addressing broadband deployment factors on a comparative, international level.

The purpose of this paper is to decrease the traffic created by search engines’ crawlers and solve the deep web problem using an innovative approach.

A new algorithm was formulated based on best existing algorithms to optimize the existing traffic caused by web crawlers, which is approximately 40 percent of all networking traffic. The crux of this approach is that web servers monitor and log changes and communicate them as an XML file to search engines. The XML file includes the information necessary to generate refreshed pages from existing ones and reference new pages that need to be crawled. Furthermore, the XML file is compressed to decrease its size to the minimum required.

The results of this study have shown that the traffic caused by search engines’ crawlers might be reduced on average by 84 percent when it comes to text content. However, binary content faces many challenges and new algorithms have to be developed to overcome these issues. The proposed approach will certainly mitigate the deep web issue. The XML files for each domain used by search engines might be used by web browsers to refresh their cache and therefore help reduce the traffic generated by normal users. This reduces users’ perceived latency and improves response time to http requests.

The study sheds light on the deficiencies and weaknesses of the algorithms monitoring changes and generating binary files. However, a substantial decrease of traffic is achieved for text-based web content.

The findings of this research can be adopted by web server software and browsers’ developers and search engine companies to reduce the internet traffic caused by crawlers and cut costs.

The exponential growth of web content and other internet-based services such as cloud computing, and social networks has been causing contention on available bandwidth of the internet network. This research provides a much needed approach to keeping traffic in check.

This article presents opportunities for the effective utilization of the Internet with regard to the banking industry. It is shown that the appropriate application of today’s cutting‐edge technology can lead to a momentous competitive advantage for banks. This is illustrated by a scenario focussing on the potentials of “Advising via Internet”.

Focuses on current and near‐term efforts to integrate Web browsing, computing, e‐mail, video telephony and voice telephony in a hand‐held device. Concludes with observations about the probable product/markets resulting from integration. Concludes the Far East seems to be the potential market for smart phones.

The Internet environment, with its packet‐switched network and lack of resource reservation mechanisms, has made the delivery of low bit‐rate real‐time communication services particularly difficult and challenging. The high potential transmission delay and data packet loss under varying network conditions will lead to unpleasant and unintelligible audio and jerky video play‐out. The Internet TCP/IP protocol suite can be extended with new mechanisms in an attempt to tackle such problems. In this research, an integrated transmission mechanism that incorporates a number of existing techniques to enhance the quality and deliver “acceptable” real‐time services is proposed. These techniques include the use of data compression, data buffering, dynamic rate control, packet lost replacement, silence deletion and virtual video play‐out mechanism. The proposed transmission mechanism is designed as a generic communication system so that it can be used in different systems and conditions. This approach has been successfully implemented and demonstrated using three separate systems that include the Internet Phone, WebVideo and video‐conferencing tool.

This paper aims to describe the effect of VoIP network architectures on the cost modelling of termination rates of VoIP services.

The study investigates and organises the arguments available in the technical and regulatory field related to VoIP networks and services in order to ascertain the possible impact of VoIP techniques, the provisioning of voice features in VoIP networks, and network interconnection issues on the cost of regulated VoIP services.

The information and analysis reveals how the provision of VoIP services is related to a number of issues that will have an effect on the cost of VoIP termination rates. In particular, the study analyses the impact on a cost model of the components of a VoIP network architecture, the usage factor of network elements, and the traffic volume generated by VoIP applications.

The issues described in the article can be used in elaborating a cost model for termination rates in VoIP networks. For the present study, no cost model was built, and therefore no quantitative estimations were made of the specific impact of every cost parameter on the termination rates.

The findings of this study can be used by policy makers, voice operators, and researchers.

Most studies of VoIP that are available in the literature address, on the one hand, the costs of corporate VoIP networks and, on the other, the regulation of VoIP services. This article, however, presents a comprehensive study of the most relevant features of VoIP network architectures that should be considered when determining regulated termination rates.