The purpose of this study was to determine the availability of Internet access for students attending East Tennessee State University during the fall semester 2013. It has been unknown to what degree broadband access is available in the East Tennessee State University service area that includes counties in East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Western North Carolina. The research was conducted during the fall semester 2013 including the months of August, September, and October of 2011. Data were gathered by surveying currently enrolled students of the university. Seven hundred eighty-four students responded to the survey. The survey instrument covered areas of demographics and Internet connection type from home. In addition, the instrument covered usage of 3G/4G Mobile Broadband Service, ETSU computer labs, and high-speed Internet service for coursework. The results of the data analysis provided insight into the availability, frequency of use, and perceived importance of high-speed Internet access for students at ETSU. For example, over 95% of the respondents had either a high-speed Internet connection or 3G/4G Mobile Broadband Service at their place of residence. Fifteen percent were dissatisfied with their current high-speed Internet service. Approximately 70% reported that high-speed Internet service was very important in completing coursework. This study provided an increase in the body of knowledge related to Internet access for ETSU students and the counties surrounding the university.

Even if 3rd and 4th generation wireless systems aim to achieve multimedia services at high speed, it is rather difficult to have full-fledged multimedia services due to insufficient capacity of the systems. There are many technical challenges placed on us in order to realize the real multimedia services. One of those challenges is how efficiently to allocate resources to traffic as the wireless systems evolve. The review of the literature shows that strategic manipulation of traffic can lead to an efficient use of resources in both wire-line and wireless networks. This aspect brings our attention to the role of link layer protocols, which is to orchestrate the transmission of packets in an efficient way using given resources. Therefore, the Media Access Control (MAC) layer plays a very important role in this context. In this research, we investigate technical challenges involving resource control and management in the design of MAC protocols based on the characteristics of traffic, and provide some strategies to solve those challenges. The first and foremost matter in wireless MAC protocol research is to choose the type of multiple access schemes. Each scheme has advantages and disadvantages. We choose Wireless Code Division Multiple Access/Time Division Duplexing (WCDMA/TDD) systems since they are known to be efficient for bursty traffic. Most existing MAC protocols developed for WCDMA/TDD systems are interested in the performance of a unidirectional link, in particular in the uplink, assuming that the number of slots for each link is fixed a priori. That ignores the dynamic aspect of TDD systems. We believe that adaptive dynamic slot allocation can bring further benefits in terms of efficient resource management. Meanwhile, this adaptive slot allocation issue has been dealt with from a completely different angle. Related research works are focused on the adaptive slot allocation to minimize inter-cell interference under multi-cell environments. We believe that these two issues need to be handled together in order to enhance the performance of MAC protocols, and thus embark upon a study on the adaptive dynamic slot allocation for the MAC protocol. This research starts from the examination of key factors that affect the adaptive allocation strategy. Through the review of the literature, we conclude that traffic characterization can be an essential component for this research to achieve efficient resource control and management. So we identify appropriate traffic characteristics and metrics. The volume and burstiness of traffic are chosen as the characteristics for our adaptive dynamic slot allocation. Based on this examination, we propose four major adaptive dynamic slot allocation strategies: (i) a strategy based on the estimation of burstiness of traffic, (ii) a strategy based on the estimation of volume and burstiness of traffic, (iii) a strategy based on the parameter estimation of a distribution of traffic, and (iv) a strategy based on the exploitation of physical layer information. The first method estimates the burstiness in both links and assigns the number of slots for each link according to a ratio of these two estimates. The second method estimates the burstiness and volume of traffic in both links and assigns the number of slots for each link according to a ratio of weighted volumes in each link, where the weights are driven by the estimated burstiness in each link. For the estimation of burstiness, we propose a new burstiness measure that is based on a ratio between peak and median volume of traffic. This burstiness measure requires the determination of an observation window, with which the median and the peak are measured. We propose a dynamic method for the selection of the observation window, making use of statistical characteristics of traffic: Autocorrelation Function (ACF) and Partial ACF (PACF). For the third method, we develop several estimators to estimate the parameters of a traffic distribution and suggest two new slot allocation methods based on the estimated parameters. The last method exploits physical layer information as another way of allocating slot to enhance the performance of the system. The performance of our proposed strategies is evaluated in various scenarios. Major simulations are categorized as: simulation on data traffic, simulation on combined voice and data traffic, simulation on real trace data. The performance of each strategy is evaluated in terms of throughput and packet drop ratio. In addition, we consider the frequency of slot changes to assess the performance in terms of control overhead. We expect that this research work will add to the state of the knowledge in the field of link-layer protocol research for WCDMA/TDD systems. / Ph. D.

L'objectif de cette thèse est le déploiement et l'évaluation d'une plate-forme de télé-échographie mobile, utilisée pour fournir un diagnostic et des soins à distance dans des milieux médicalement isolés. La plateforme intègre de nouveaux concepts qui permettent de l’utilisation de la télé-échographie robotisée sur les réseaux sans fil 3G, 4G et 5G pour satisfaire au transfert de qualité des vidéos ultrasonores pour un diagnostic médical robuste. Ce travail contribue au domaine des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication appliquées au secteur de la santé et en particulier à la robotique médicale téléopérée. Les principales contributions de la thèse sont : I. Un état de l’art des systèmes télé-robotiques appliqués au médical menée sur la base de publications écrites entre 2004 et 2016, II. L'évaluation objective et subjective (clinique) de la qualité vidéo a démontré que les normes H.264/AVC et HEVC peuvent atteindre une qualité vidéo sans perte de diagnostic à des débits (1024 et 2048 Kbps) bien en deçà des débits de données supportés par les réseaux 4G. Les normes de codage vidéo antérieures (Mpeg-4, Mpeg-2) ne peuvent pas être utilisées pour le diagnostic clinique à ces débits car elles présentent une perte d'information pour le diagnostic médical, III. Les experts médicaux ont apprécié la réactivité dynamique mécanique de la plate-forme en raison du faible délai présenté par les canaux LTE. La limitation la plus importante soulevée par l'expert médical, empêchant une évaluation globale clinique favorable au diagnostic, était le positionnement initial du robot sur le corps du patient et son déplacement vers l'obtention d’une échographie cardiaque, Les résultats fournissent une forte indication que la plate-forme télé-échographie robotisée peut être utilisée pour fournir un diagnostic fiable et à distance sur les réseaux sans fil émergents 4G et au-delà. / The objective of this Thesis was the deployment and evaluation of an end-to-end mobile tele-echography platform used to provide remote diagnosis and care within medically isolated settings. The platform integrates new concepts that enable robotized tele-echography over commercially available 4G and beyond mobile networks for rendering diagnostically robust medical ultrasound video. It contributes to the field of Information and Communication technologies applied in the healthcare sector. The main contributions of the Thesis are: I. A systematic review on the state of the art in medical telerobotic systems was conducted based on publications of the last decade, and more specifically between the years 2004 to 2016. II. Both objective and subjective (clinical) video quality assessment demonstrated that H.264/AVC and HEVC standards can achieve diagnostically-lossless video quality at bitrates (1024 and 2048 Kbps) well within the LTE supported data rates. Earlier video coding standards (Mpeg-4 & Mpeg-2) cannot be employed for clinical diagnosis at these rates as they present loss of clinical information.III. Medical experts highly appreciated the proposed platform’s mechanical dynamic responsiveness due to the low end-to-end delay (latency) facilitated by LTE-channels. The most important limitation raised by the medical expert and prevented higher overall rating and ultimately clinical QoE was the robot initial positioning on the patient’s body and navigation towards obtaining the cardiac ultrasound. IV. Results provides a strong indication that the proposed robotized tele-echography platform can be used to provide reliable, remote diagnosis over emerging 4G and beyond wireless networks.

In recent years, innovation and the subsequent technological advancements have gained significance in shaping consumer behavior to a disruptive extent. Especially with the advancements in mobile technology, consumer behaviors shifted towards an elevated expectation of mobility and increased interactivity. Marketers who seek a better degree of access to the consumer market and provide customer satisfaction needed to adopt new tools and methods in communication, which would align with their target groups more effectively. Mobile marketing emerged as an innovative technique that is based on and driven by this change in consumer behavior; therefore it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of its approach and implementation. In this light, this research paper employs a quantitative approach based on the results' analysis of an online survey conducted by the Author of the thesis, aimed at testing whether there is a strong correlation between mobile marketing efforts and customer satisfaction. Consequently, one can conclude that the same mobile devices that serve as convenience for consumers, serve as an effective channel of communication for marketers, whereas with an integrated approach where other components of the marketing mix support mobile content, the likeliness of attaining consumer satisfaction is higher.