Mobile Enabled Emerging Solutions

The basic principle of Spoken Web lies in creating a system analogous to the World Wide Web using a technology most of us all have in common - speech. Spoken Web helps people create voice sites using a simple telephone, mobile or landline. The user gets a unique phone number which is analogous to a URL and when other users access this voice site they get to hear the content uploaded there. Interestingly, all these voice sites can be interlinked creating a massive network, which can work like the World Wide Web.

Researchers: Sheetal K. Agarwal, Anupam Jain, Arun Kumar, Priyanka Manwani, Sougata Mukherjea, Amit A. Nanavati, Nitendra Rajput, Aaditeshwar Seth

BusinessFinder is an advanced presence-driven, real-time location based service solution providing consumers the ability to establish connection to business services and individual vendors quickly, whenever and wherever needed. BusinessFinder links business information with network capabilities to build a dynamic real-time repository offering that leverages multiple information channels and communication modalities.

With built-in dynamic appointment scheduling, multi-modal subscription channels, and real-time data-driven matching, BusinessFinder provides enormous opportunities for businesses to effectively use real-time data and drive revenue. Such opportunities range from better work force management to enabling real-time social networking. In an open marketplace, it provides significant opportunities to roll-out advertisement portals for micro-businesses where real-time data is one of the key drivers to route requests.

Researchers: Nilanjan Banerjee, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Sumit Mittal, Sougata Mukherjea

Mobile devices are becoming more ubiquitous and have already outnumbered landlines in emerging economies. With such wide penetration and personal access to the device, consumers expect it to address their day-to-day needs apart from the basic function of talking to someone, like checking their emails or carrying out simple to complex commercial activities like shopping, trading, or banking. Mobile based commerce has been around for a while now, but still hasn't seen wide scale adoption across various market segments. With the evolution of telecom technologies and availability of high speed data access over mobile devices, the root causes seem to have been addressed. It is now up to the community to take up the challenge to bring innovation into the mobile commerce space.

Researchers: Kalapriya Kannan, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman and Vinod V Mankar

Mobile device is fast emerging as a new media or channel to do business in the digital world. It has penetrated the rural population. This provides opportunities to the businesses, both small and big to reach out to a large user base with innovative services and products. In collaboration with India Software Lab, we are working to extend the reach of mobile commerce, mobile micromarketing/advertising and mobile payments to the entire economic pyramid (for example from malls to local grocery stores), and integrating these processes in interesting ways to deliver end-to-end solutions.

Researchers: Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, Alwyn R Lobo and Karthik Visweswariah

Presence has rapidly evolved to become the de-facto method of representing and querying the dynamic status of an individual, device or abstract entity (for example, the number of attendees in a conference call) in a variety of Web- based content provider, enterprise and service provider converged applications.

With the proliferation of presence, an individual's contextual state is increasingly fragmented across different applications and provider domains. Currently, presence- based applications operate in domain-specific silos, unaware of the individual's presence status in other domains. To support increasingly sophisticated, large-scale deployment of presence-based applications -- for example a call-center (Helpdesk) monitoring application interested in the percentage of call- center employees who are available -- we are developing a presence virtualization layer that provides a programmable abstraction by which applications can easily query for their desired collective view of presence, without focusing on the details of individual presentities.

Our presence virtualization middleware tackles the two important challenges of query flexibility (via a programming model that is expressive enough to support a wide variety of virtualization queries) and scalability (by controlling both the network traffic load and the query processing overhead).

Researchers: Arup Acharya, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Nilanjan Banerjee, Koustuv Dasgupta, Shachi Sharma, Xiping Wang

Problem determination in a large and dynamic enterprise IT system is a challenging task. The situation is aggravated by lack of end-to-end view of applications running in the system and occasional change of system administrators. In this project, we are investigating methods for problem determination by reusing the knowledge of already resolved problems.

Researchers: Partha Dutta, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, Kalapriya Kannan and Shubhadip Mitra

The core objective of the project is to allow a regular Java programmer with no knowledge of multiple telecom protocols and heterogeneity thereof create mobile devices and telecom network applications. This project resulted in an easy-to-use, Eclipse based telecom application development environment incorporating Web 2.0 principles such as community based development, easy search, reuse, and blog that expose telecom and device functions by the way of T-REC proxies and M-proxies to simplify the task of incorporating telecom functions in IT applications.

Additionally, in coordination with Haifa Research Lab, we developed a modeling toolkit that uses the T-REC proxy model to offer modeling based telecom application development environment, more suited for traditional application development.

Researchers: Sunil Goyal, Sumit Mittal, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Sougata Mukherjea

An analysis of telecom call social network graphs often provides insights for telecom operators to measure the true value of a customer. The telecom call graph analyses are computationally expensive but play a key role in finding parameters beyond bill generated to mark the importance of each customer to the telecom player.

SNAzzy analyzes the social networks graphs formed by telephone calls, voice and SMS (text), among the customers of telecom service providers. It performs a global structural analysis of the graph to determine various structural attributes of the call graph such as degree distribution of telecom customers in terms of incoming and outgoing calls (and other attributes). The technology finds structural communities in the call graph such as cliques, stars and dense sub-graphs among others, and computes telecom customers with a risk of churn from the social angle.

Researchers: Kuntal Dey, Natwar Modani, Sougata Mukherjea, Amit A. Nanavati

The Next Generation Telecom research team in IRL is currently involved in developing wireless 4G assets on state-of-the-art multi-core processors. This project is in collaboration with colleagues from China Research Lab (CRL). Our software assets span PHY, MAC, and network layer of 4G technologies (specifically WiMAX). The WiMAX 4G assets are used in two threads of our research. First, in the software radio implementation of WiMAX protocols and second, in the development of 4G service appliances. Our research group is currently investigating the following:

• Implementation challenges in designing 4G assets for future multi-core processors
• Intersection of telecommunication and IT service assets in 4G protocols

Researchers: Malolan Chetlur, Umamaheshwari Devi, Partha Dutta, Parul Gupta and Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, along with IBM China Research Lab (CRL)

With the rapid growth of mobile communication technologies from second generation (2G) to third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G), there is a need for newer wireless network architectures, which can reduce cost and provide higher flexibility. The Wireless Network Cloud (WNC) is a novel wireless system architecture that leverages developments in cloud computing and emerging wireless technologies, such as Software Radio and Remote Radio Header technology. WNC allows separation of hardware and software development for different wireless standards and enables cost savings through infrastructure sharing between operators. It also opens up many new business models for network access and service providers. The Next Generation Telecom team at IRL is working with China Research Lab for defining the WNC system requirements and architecture and building a WNC proof-of-concept.

Researchers: : Malolan Chetlur, Umamaheshwari Devi, Partha Dutta, Parul Gupta and Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, along with IBM China Research Lab (CRL)