This resource provides a comprehensive survey of current and emerging intelligent telecommunications networks, including underlying software, implementation, deployment, and standards. Readers are given an overview of new technologies and standards that allow operators and service providers to create and deploy value-added services in a changing world increasingly dominated by packet switched networks using the internet protocol (IP). The main goal of this book is to inform telecommunications engineers, ICT managers, and students about building applications and services over communications networks and managing them.

This authoritative new resource explores the power grid from its classical role as a utility or service provider towards its new role as an application development platform. This book gives insight into the vision, problems and solutions, and risks of the smart grid model. The evolution of the power grid as it develops into an application-centric environment is explained in this book. This resource guides readers to better understand the primary motivation of the smart grid, and to explore how new technologies are creating a cleaner and more sustainable ecosystem for new business models to blossom. Key topics include the basics of electricity and the conventional grid structure, as well as the relationships between conventional economic models and emerging models based on transactive energy and the sharing economy. This book presents the orchestration of smart grid technologies as they are transforming the utility sector toward a human-centric grid. Readers gain insight into how they are playing an active role in the operation of the utility business as well as in the transfer of electrons. This book demonstrates how the new smart grid is becoming a distributed system that supports decentralized services through modern trends and distributed system architectures. Readers learn how grid intelligence and energy production migrates to the edge of the network. This book explores how consumers are transformed to “prosumers” of energy and providers of critical data that are dramatically changing the relationship with the electric utility business in order to enable new applications and services.

This practical resource provides a survey on the technologies, protocols, and architectures that are widely used in practice to implement networked multimedia services. The book presents the background and basic concepts behind multimedia networking, and provides a detailed analysis of how multimedia services work, reviewing the diverse network protocols that are of common use to implement them. To guide the explanation of concepts, the book focuses on a representative set of networked multimedia services with proven success and high penetration in the telecommunication market, namely Internet telephony, Video-on-Demand (VoD), and live IP television (IPTV). Contents are presented following a stepwise approach, describing each network protocol in the context of a networked multimedia service and making appropriate references to the protocol as needed in the description of other multimedia services. This book also contains questions and exercises to provide the reader with insight on the practical application of the explained concepts. Additionally, a laboratory practice is included, based on open-source tools and software, to analyze the operation of an Internet telephony service from a practical perspective, as well as to deploy some of its fundamental components.

The present information age is enabled by telecommunications and information technology and the continued convergence of their services, technologies and business models. Within telecommunications, the historic separations between fixed networks, mobile telephone networks and data communications are diminishing. Similarly, information technology and enterprise communications show convergence with telecommunications. These synergies are captured in the concept of Next Generation Networks that result from evolution to new technologies, enabling new services and applications. Network Convergence creates a framework to aid the understanding of Next Generation Networks, their potential for supporting new and enhanced applications and their relationships with legacy networks. The book identifies and explains the concepts and principles underlying standards for networks, services and applications. Network Convergence: Gives comprehensive coverage of packet multimedia, enterprise networks, third generation mobile communications, OSA/Parlay and developments in fixed networks. Gives an integrated view of diverse information and communications systems and technology through a common NGN Framework. Delves into protocols, APIs and software processes for supporting services and applications in advanced networks. Discusses a variety of applications of telecommunications supporting IT and IT enhanced by communications. Follows developments in operations support systems standards and links these to next generation networks. Includes a wealth of examples, use cases, tables and illustrations that help reinforce the material for students and practitioners. Features an accompanying website with PowerPoint presentations, glossary, web references, tutorial problems, and 'learn more' pages. This essential reference guide will prove invaluable to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academics and researchers. It will also be of interest to professionals working for telecommunications network operators, equipment vendors, telecoms regulators, and engineers who wish to further their knowledge of next generation networks.

This issue of Trends in Communication will inspire researchers to take up the matter of convergence as a topic for research. We are entering a world--literally--without technical borders, and we need to adapt our markets as well as our economic and political institutions to that world. Whereas the scientific community has the luxury of being able to sit back and contemplate the issue from every possible angle, bureaucrats, legislators, and regulators are already working out the solutions to practical problems. This issue will hopefully also inform them about convergence and its problems.

This book deals with both the understanding of, and the explanation of, knowledge about the causes, processes, and patterns of convergence innovation. It argues that the process of convergence innovation is a continuous disequilibrium between reference technology and its matching technology, adjusting the optimal balance between the functions of the two technologies. Contributors describe how convergence innovation is a learning process that requires both vertical and horizontal convergence, and case studies explore the different types of convergence innovation such as outside-in and inside-out. Convergence innovation has been taking place mainly by applying IT technologies to vast areas of conventional technologies, so that individuals or firms reap the benefits of the convergence between IT and conventional technologies. Such innovations are made possible by convergence, and they ultimately improve the welfare of human beings as companies solve diverse problems and increase employment. Examples in this book include biochemical companies in Indonesia, who were able to increase their market shares in bio-fertilizer and bio-pesticide products through bio-based technological convergence; and textile machinery firms in South Korea who have been survived by achieving convergence innovation on their core competences. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Asian Journal of Technology Innovation.

An indispensable reference publication for telecommunication and information-industry professionals. Each year, the IEC brings together into one unique resource the most current thinking and practical experience of industry leaders around the world on a variety of topics facing their areas of specialization. This 700+ page reference tool is a must for executives, managers, engineers, analysts, and educators in all sectors of today's changing information industry.

Today's enterprise cannot effectively function without a network, and today's enterprise network is almost always based on LAN technology. In a few short years, LANs have become an essential element of today's business environment. This time in the spotlight, while well deserved, has not come without a price. Businesses now insist that LANs deliver vast and ever-increasing quantities of business-critical information and that they do it efficiently, flawlessly, without fail, and most of all, securely. Today's network managers must consistently deliver this level of performance, and must do so while keeping up with ever changing, ever increasing demands without missing a beat. At the same time, today's IT managers must deliver business-critical information systems in an environment that has undergone radical paradigm shifts in such widely varied fields as computer architecture, operating systems, application development, and security. The Local Area Networks Handbook focuses on this collective environment, in which networking and information technology work together to create LAN-based enterprise networks. Topics have been selected and organized with this in mind, providing both depth and breadth of coverage. The handbook will provide you not only an understanding of how LANs work and how to go about selecting and implementing LAN products, but also of how to leverage LAN capabilities for the benefit of your enterprise.

The Internet is a remarkable catalyst for creativity, collaboration and innovation providing us with amazing possibilities that just two decades ago would have been impossible to imagine. This work includes a peer-reviewed collection of scientific papers addressing some of the challenges that shape the Internet of the future.