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Lancaster University's pioneering research on Quality-of-Service (QoS) architecture has led to significant impact on the development of TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) — the digital radio standard used by emergency and public safety services globally. The route to impact was via UK projects on Mobile and Emergency Multimedia. It involved the transfer of QoS technology and know-how to HW Communications Ltd (HWC), a Lancaster-based SME. HWC became instrumental in developing the outcomes of our collaboration in TETRA's Multimedia Exchange Layer (MEX) standard and its specification for TETRA II (or TETRA Enhanced Data Services, TEDS) — a new version of TETRA that enables multimedia data services. MEX was adopted as a new clause in the TETRA II release in 2010. The impact is that vendors of TETRA equipment manufactured after 2010 can implement MEX in their products, thereby leveraging Lancaster's pioneering QoS research to enable applications to obtain the best possible level of service in a standardised way — which is absolutely crucial for the public-safety and related applications for which TETRA is being used.
Low-cost wireless solutions beyond the technologies available previously and developed at Loughborough University since 2005 are used by IDC, and Sure, who integrate these technologies in several products and services so generating impacts in terms of:
The technologies have been deployed in a logistics distribution centre (ToysRUs), an automotive manufacturing process (Toyota), and a safety and security system (Sure).
Mobile technologies and in particular mobile applications have become key drivers of the economy in many countries especially those that lack established communications infrastructures. Since 2003, the research team led by Professor Al-Begain has created both significant infrastructure and know-how that became the base for the creation of the £6.4million Centre of Excellence in Mobile Applications and Services (CEMAS) that is providing research and development to SMEs in Wales to increase their competitiveness. In the first three years since its inception 28 projects have been completed and 66 companies have received services.
This research by the University's Transportation Research Group (TRG) has contributed to the development of sustainable road transport networks both in the UK and other leading cities worldwide. In summary:
Increasing use of mobile phones and the consequent congestion of the original bands have meant that over the last decade, additional bands have been released, and all current mobile phones need to operate at up to five different frequency bands. Professor Hall's group supported by £160k from British Telecom Labs, showed how to design a multi-band planar inverted F antenna, using slots in the antenna top plate. The published papers have since been quoted in many industrial patents and widely acknowledged to be the first publications of the antenna. Nokia, who had the largest market share in the REF period, based their antenna designs on the slot concept, and hence a large proportion of the several billion phones in the world today use this antenna, with a financial value of many millions of pounds.
While basic communications protocols for the Internet were developed decades ago, new requirements such as bandwidth-hungry multimedia and the need for the Internet to reach the "final third" of the population create constant demand for improvements. Research at the University of Aberdeen has greatly contributed to meeting this demand by influencing the standardization and implementation of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack in commercial networks. New standards for Internet Transport Protocols and Satellite IP Transmission resulting from the research have been implemented in industrial products in Europe and the US, benefitting industry and millions of end users.
Professor Zhongyu (Joan) Lu's research contributed significantly to the development of a next-generation student response system (SRS) that is fully integrated with web services, Smartphones, multimedia and other ubiquitous technologies. By incorporating the use of widely available online equipment, the system has made SRS more affordable, easier to employ and applicable in a range of settings far more diverse than the traditional classroom scenario. It is now used in Europe and the US by both academia and industry and has served as the basis for a number of dedicated prototypes. Its success has also led to additional major funding streams for further research.
This case study reports the impact on businesses and practitioners of model-driven software architecture research, workflow-based application development, and intelligent computing through a series of connected JISC, Knowledge Connect projects, and, especially, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.
Key impacts for software companies, related to their software development processes and products, include the adoption of the model-driven architecture approach, showing:
Integration of intelligent computing in the form of data mining and decision support in software processes and products.
Research undertaken between 2002 and 2012 at Birkbeck has helped establish a participatory approach to cyber-physical computing as the predominant methodology for the construction of mobile and pervasive computing systems. Cyber-physical systems intimately interlink material entities and their information representations as existing on the Internet. Our specific research contributions in systems architecture, privacy protection and human dynamics have demonstrated how the user's activity can be exploited as the core ingredient in building such systems. Our research has resulted in the implementation of applications that are used to monitor biodiversity across the globe, to assess and support Parkinson's disease patients in the UK, to improve the well-being of office workers in London, to engage the public in a debate about the costs and benefits of pervasive computing, and to inform legislatures in the UK and the US.
The worldwide population of mobile TV subscribers had almost quadrupled from 75 million in 2008 to 271 million in 2011, and it is expected to reach 792.5 million by 2014 according to RNCOS report (an industry and consultancy firm) on Global Mobile TV Forecast to 2013. The recent roll-out of 4G in the UK strongly features its capacity to deliver real-time TV programmes and videos with high-definition image quality on their mobile devices. Brunel Wireless Networks and Communications Centre developed a global schema, DVB-CBMS (Digital Video Broadcast - Convergence of Broadcast and Mobile Service), subsequently adapted as OMA-BCAST (Open Mobile Alliance - Broadcasting Services Enabler Suite), which enables users to access mainstream TV channels at real time through various networks such as DVB-H in Europe, DVB-SH (satellite) in the USA and DVB-NGH in China.
OMA-BCAST has been successfully used in South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana since 2010: a digital satellite TV service provider, DStv Mobile, delivers mobile TV programmes to its 6.7 million subscribers in Africa. In Europe, 3 Italia offered DVB-H customers free access to six TV channels in 2008; 3 Austria had 90,000 subscribers to its DVB-H mobile TV service between 2008 and 2009. Major mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung and LG have launched special mobile TV editions (e.g. Nokia 5330, Samsung, Philips, Garmin, LG, Motorola, Sagem, ZTE, etc) using DVB-H technology and the convergence system.