SATNAC 2009 Conference Papers
Innovation & Regulatory
Title: Contributions of Information and Communication
Technology to Global Development: A Trend Analysis
Authors: Felix Bankole (
Abstract: In the last two decades, the worldwide information and communication
technology (ICT) market has been growing at a rapid rate. This has led to the
global net increase in ICT usage and investments. International organizations,
ICT vendors, Policy makers have been trying to determine if such huge
investments are worthwhile. However, the result regarding this issue is
inconclusive, for this research area is fraught with complexity and existing
empirical study is limited. In this study, the four aspects of ICT investments
were investigated. The analysis implies that all the four aspects of ICT
investments considered in this study are contributing to development.
Title: Development and Implementation of a Web-based
Resource for Multilingual ICT Education
Authors: Lorenzo Dalvit (
Abstract: The language barrier limits the access to the
study of ICT-related subjects for speakers of an African language, both at
Undergraduate and postgraduate level. In response tot he need to create
competent African graduates in these fields, in this paper we discuss an
application which uses such students' mother tongue (as well as English) to
increase access. The development and implementation of such application are
described. data are provided on its use and impact on the attitudes of a group
of African students in the foundation course at
Title: Internet of
Things: Emerging and Future Scenarios from an Information Security Perspective
Authors: Moses
Dlamini (
Abstract: Information
security is becoming a major concern for most world wide telecommunication
companies and more so as we move towards the future Internet of Things. In this
era, a plethora of digital devices, people and other physical objects have the
potential to seamlessly connect and interact on the future Internet of Things.
This paper takes a leap forward to proactively discuss the type of threats that
we are likely to face in the future Internet of Things. We discuss scenarios of
how a botnet of stoves can bring down a power grid, future life threatening
health systems and how a distributed denial of service can be used to beat
competition and increase revenues of Telcos.
Title: A Tele-economic Approach for MNOs and Software Based
M-VoIP Operators to Co-exist Using Game Theory
Authors: Luzango Mfupe (
Abstract: In recent years, the telecommunications industry has seen the emergency
of Software based M-VoIP Operators who are speedily rolling out cheap products
and services to compete with incumbent Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). These
new entrants do not have their own access networks but rather, deliver their
services seamlessly by largely exploiting incumbent's 3G networks and public
Wi-Fi hotspots mostly using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). In this paper, a
novel tele-economic approach for co-existence of the two types of operators is
proposed and compared with the traditional Mobile Virtual Network Operators
(MVNOs) approach. Game theory was used to determine the conditions under the
two could coexist and compete (using the South African context) in a market in
which mobile subscriber belongs to both. Gambit Tool was used to obtain the
Nash equilibria by enumeration of mixed strategies which prove to be a win-win
situation.
Title: Cell Phone Notification via Bluetooth for Web 2.0
Applications
Authors: Muyowa Mutemwa (
Abstract: This paper discusses how an
Instant Messaging application on a computer can use Bluetooth in order to
provide vibration notification on a mobile phone. The initial motivation was to
aid Deaf1 office workers to know when events happened on the computer on their
desks. Deaf people with access to modern technology have become accustomed to
using Instant Messaging, email and video conferencing. However, most of these
applications are designed for hearing users and often use audible notification.
Cell phone vibration offers a way to convey similar notifications because many
Deaf users have a cell phone. The use of SMS has also become widespread among
Deaf users because they cannot hear or speak, even though they might be
somewhat text illiterate. Vibration notification in addition to aural
notification is common on most cell phones and Deaf users can use the former.
This paper describes a Bluetooth notification system to notify a Deaf user with
vibration on a cell phone whenever a new Instant Message is received on a given
computer. A design goal was to provide
an application programming interface to the notification system so that it can
be used with any form of Web 2.0 desktop communication tool.
Title: A Low Complexity Recurrent Neural Network MLSE
Equaliser: Applications and Results
Authors: Hermanus
Myburgh
(
Abstract: In this paper a
soft output low complexity neural network based iterative Maximum Likelihood
Sequence Estimation (MLSE) equaliser, based on earlier work by the authors, is
evaluated for different communication systems. The equaliser is evaluated for
underwater acoustic- and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) communication
systems, and a method for exploiting the low complexity optimisation ability of
the equaliser is also demonstrated using multiple transmit antennas. The
equaliser is evaluated in environments where the channel delay spread is very
long compared to the symbol period. Long delay spreads imply long channel
impulse response (CIR) lengths, or channel memory lengths, making the process
of optimal equalisation very difficult, as the computational complexity of
optimal equalisers that are currently being used is exponentially related to
the CIR length. It was shown in earlier work by the authors that the iterative
MLSE equaliser is able to equalise signals in systems with hundreds of
interfering symbols, since its computational complexity is approximately
independent of the CIR length. The results presented in this paper emphasises
the ability of the proposed equaliser to outperform suboptimal equalisers that
are currently being used in systems with extremely long CIR length, while doing
so at very low computational cost.
Authors: Zenzo Ncube (
Abstract: A lot of research
has been done to analyze the relationships between telecommunication technology
proliferation and other social, economic and telecommunication indicators such
as Gross National Income per Capita (GNIC), Freedom from Corruption (FC), etc.
According to many researchers, there is a need to carry out a reassessment of
the connection between telecommunications, economic growth and other factors in
order for countries to structure their activities especially the
telecommunications environment optimally.
Most of the research to be found in the literature concentrates on a
small subset of the factors and relationships. In this paper we propose integrated
models that are more comprehensive in nature and report on some relationships
discovered. The methodology used was mainly linear regression techniques and
interpretive techniques like linear response surface analysis (LRSA). The work
is based on data obtained for a sample of 50 from 160 countries. The data is
taken from reports of the World Bank, ITU, Heritage Foundation, IMF and other
sources.
Title: Ensuring Privacy in Presence Awareness Systems: Next
Generation Networks
Authors: Michael Nyarko
(
Abstract: Presence technology has played a significant role in the way that people
interact, allowing a more efficient means of communication by mitigating
unsuccessful attempts to reach persons who were unavailable over various means
of communication such as cellular phone, personal computer or even a landline.
Presence technology has completely revolutionalized the way people interact
with one another over the internet. Since its introduction into the
communication arena, existing internet applications such as Instant Messaging,
email and online games, have enjoyed increased number of users. Presence
technology’s success since its introduction has placed it as a possible
candidate for Next Generation Network’s services integration tool.
However, with such an increase in number of users, certain challenges arose.
Among these is the issue of privacy. Who may and may not view a user’s
presence information? How is this information kept private from third parties?
Privacy concerns of users using the presence technology, greatly affect their
willingness to use the particular application,
and if not well addressed, users my loose confidence and stop using the
particular application. This project addresses this concern of privacy by
providing a mechanism to ensure privacy. An architecture is proposed to
implement the securing of users presence information. As a practical facet of
the project at hand, the author developed and implemented a subset of the
proposed architecture over an Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem network.
The implementation demonstrated the privacy ensuring mechanism desired in this
project.
Title: Feature Set Reduction for Automatic Network Intrusion Detection with Machine Learning Algorithms
Authors: Ralf Staudemeyer (
Abstract: Selecting a minimum set of core features for
automatic network intrusion detection with a variety of machine
learningalgorithms is an challenging problem. In this paper we propose a
minimum feature set which can be easily extracted from network traffic. We compare decision trees, neural
networks, naive Bayes and Bayesian networks classifiers performing on the
KDDCup99 datasets. We show that by feature selection and preprocessing a
comparable classification performance in achievable for the benefit of a
significant reduction of training time.
Title: Automatic Voice Relay with Open Source Kiara
Authors: Long Yi (University of Western Cape), William
Tucker (University of Western Cape)
Abstract: One way
for Deaf people to communicate with hearing people over the telephone is to use
a voice relay. The service is often provided with a human relay operator that
relays text into voice, and vice versa, on behalf of the Deaf and hearing
users. In developed countries, voice relay is frequently subsidised by
governments or service providers. There is no such service in