D. Tech. Computer Science and Data Processing (Business Information Systems) / The research examined the interplay between actors in the deployment of shared telecommunication infrastructures such as broadband. The study was conducted from a social context perspective, in three-fold. This includes understanding of sharing telecommunication infrastructures in rural areas; investigation of the influencing factors; and the roles of the community members. The analysis and interpretation of the empirical data revealed that the interaction amongst actors, which manifests from processes, politics and legislation are critical in the deployment of shared telecommunication infrastructures in South Africa rural areas. Based on the findings from the study, a Telecommunication Infrastructure Sharing framework was developed. The Telecommunication Infrastructure Sharing framework is aimed at guiding shared broadband deployment in the rural areas of South Africa.

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Recently, simulation has became the most effective way for analyzing and perfecting the performance of telecommunication networks. It has proven itself as the best method in the realm of education, where the hardware capabilities for practical training are often limited. A simulated network enables students to practice hands-on network programming and to understand, in a practical way, how a data communication network operates and how protocols work.Metanet is an environment that enables the programmer to write networking applications and to test them as if using an IP network with the hosts connected through Ethernet. The whole software is a multi-process application that makes use of just the resources offered by a single machine. It runs on a UNIX system and emulates hosts that also communicate through an emulated network using TCP/IP. Each layer of the hosts' operating system is designed as a separate process that will communicate with the adjacent layers using socket pairs or UDP connections. The application layer has multi-processing capability. / Department of Computer Science

Software emulation of local area and wide area networks provides an alternative method for the design of such networks and for analyzing their performance. Emulation of bridges and routers that link networks together may provide valuable information regarding network congestion, network storms and the like before putting expensive hardware into place. Such an emulation also enables students taking a networking course to develop their own client-server applications and to visualize the basic functioning of the UDP/IP and RIP protocols.This thesis builds on the emulated local area network, Metanet, created by a previous graduate student. It adds the capability of attaching routers and bridges to multiple local and non-local emulated networks so that data may be transferred between two hosts on different segments of the same LAN (via an emulated bridge) or two different networks altogether (via an emulated router). The machines running the Metanet software should support UNIX which has Berkeley's Socket interface as emulated networks on different physical machines utilize this interface for communicating. A comparison of the new networking capabilities of Metanet and other experimental systems like XINU and MINIX is researched. / Department of Computer Science

The rapid evolution of current and upcoming high speed and complex communications networks often necessitates flawless time synchronization among the network nodes in order to guarantee performance. GPS based synchronizers have long been used for synchronizing telecommunications equipment, currently providing an accuracy of up to 10ns. Such high accuracy demands excellent operation from GPS timing receivers. Interference is an important threat to GPS performance. Any degradation in performance, due to the introduction of interference, can cause these receivers to provide a low quality timing solution, or to lose lock with incoming GPS signals altogether. This consideration motivates the study of the performance of GPS timing receivers in the presence of harmful interference. This work is devoted to the theoretical and practical investigations of the effects of RF interference on GPS-based synchronizers and their impacts on communications networks. Contributions made during this work include: a) Identification of the processes and the parameters involved in producing a timing solution which are vulnerable to interference; b) experimentbased confirmation of a hypothesis about the effects of interference on GPS timing receivers; c) identification of the effects of degraded synchronization on the performance of communications networks, especially CDMA and GSM cellular networks, which rely upon GPS based synchronizers; and d) proposal of a method to predict and avoid communications network performance degradation.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-126)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Volume 2 contains amendments to the thesis. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 223-242.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, August, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68)

Thesis (Ph. D. in Software Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2002. / Dissertation supervisor: Luqi. Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-282). Also available online.