International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.

1, January 2016

QOS EVALUATION OF HETEROGENEOUS

NETWORKS: APPLICATION-BASED APPROACH
Farnaz Farid, Seyed Shahrestani and Chun Ruan
School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, Western Sydney University,
Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT
In this paper, an application-based QoS evaluation approach for heterogeneous networks is proposed.It is
possible to expand the network capacity and coverage in a dynamic fashion by applying heterogeneous
wireless network architecture. However, the Quality of Service (QoS) evaluation of this type of network
architecture is very challenging due to the presence of different communication technologies. Different
communication technologies have different characteristics and the applications that utilize them have
unique QoS requirements. Although, the communication technologies have different performance
measurement parameters, the applications using these radio access networks have the same QoS
requirements. As a result, it would be easier to evaluate the QoS of the access networks and the overall
network configuration based on the performance of applications running on them. Using such applicationbased QoS evaluation approach, the heterogeneous nature of the underlying networks and the diversity of
their traffic can be adequately taken into account. Through simulation studies, we show that the application
performance based assessment approach facilitates better QoS management and monitoring of
heterogeneous network configurations.

KEYWORDS
QoS; QoS metric; Dynamic weight; Unified QoS Metric; application weight; weight

1.INTRODUCTION
The advancement and proliferation of modern wireless and cellular technologies have changed
the way people work and communicate. By 2018, the data traffic over mobile networks is
expected to reach 15.9 exabytes per month, with 69 percent of that consisting of video. There will
be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices by 2018, which will exceed the worlds expected
population at that time [1]. To deal with this growing number of devices and the massive
increases in traffic, the networks are moving towards an all-heterogeneous architecture. Any
heterogeneous network constitutes of different communication technologies. These technologies
have distinct bandwidths, coverage area, and operating frequencies. Their QoS characteristics,
such as delay, throughput, and packet loss, as well as usage and implementation costs also differ
from each other. As a result, the adaptation of heterogeneous network-based architecture for the
provision of different applications especially multimedia applications faces significant challenges.
Among these challenges, QoS-related issues such as the effective QoS evaluation, management,
and monitoring still top the list [2].
Managing QoS for video or voice applications over heterogeneous networks is a challenging task.
A research from Nemertes shows that the companies invest a significant amount of their budget to
manage VoIP applications over these network architectures. For small enterprises, the annual
costs range from $25,000, and for global enterprises this cost is around $2 million [3]. Therefore,
DOI : 10.5121/ijcnc.2016.8104

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

the enterprises need to dedicate a lot of their effort to ensure service quality at every level of the
network. System downtime is another challenge for businesses, which could often happen due to
poor network management and monitoring. According to Gartner research, the hourly cost of
system downtime for large enterprises was $42,000, with a typical business on average,
experiencing 87 hours of downtime per year [4]. As a result, the QoS of any service-based
network should be monitored, managed, and evaluated on an ongoing basis.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of unified metric measurement functions that can help
with assessing the application-based performance of heterogeneous networks. By taking the
relevant performance-related parameters into account, these functions quantify the underlying
network and the application-related QoS with a numerical value. The proposed approach
considers the effects of the QoS-related parameters, the available network-based applications, and
the available Radio Access Networks (RANs) to characterize the network performance with a set
of three integrated QoS metrics. The first metric denotes the performance of each possible
application in the network. The second one is related to the performance of each of the radio
access networks present in the network. The third one characterize the QoS level of the entire
network configuration. The core of this method is considering the effects of different application
and radio access networks on the QoS of heterogeneous networks.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the background and motivations
of this work. Section 3 illustrates the concept of unified QoS metric. Section 4 presents the
application weight calculations in detail. Some simulation studies and result analysis are
illustrated in section 5. The impact and the significance of the applications for QoS analysis are
then discussed in Section 6. The last section gives the conclusions and proposes the future works.

2. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATIONS

QoS evaluation in heterogeneous networks has been an active area of research [5, 6]. Most of the
existing research focuses on the partial QoS evaluation of a heterogeneous network by deriving
the performance level of a single access network and a single application present within that
environment. Also, different studies have come up with various performance metrics for QoS
evaluation of these networks. The conventional methods do not consider the performance of all
the applications running on a network. For example, if there are voice and video conferencing
running over a UMTS network, these methods do not include the performance analysis of these
applications to quantify the overall network QoS. Furthermore, there is no unified metric to
quantify the QoS of a network, which considers the performance of all the access networks present
in it. For example, in a heterogeneous environment, there are three access networks, such as
UMTS, WiMAX, and LTE. At present, no unified metric can represent the performance of this
network configuration using the QoS-related parameters of these access networks.
Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM)
algorithms have been widely employed in the area of the heterogeneous networks from vertical
handover perspectives [7, 8]. The most common criteria, which are considered during this ranking
process, are service, network, and user related [9]. These can include received signal strength,
type of the service, minimum bandwidth, delay, throughput, packet loss, bit error rate, cost,
transmit power, traffic load, battery status of the mobile unit, and the users preferences. To
facilitate the combining of these attributes into a single value, based on their relative importance,
a weight is assigned to each attribute.
The weights for QoS-related parameters have both subjective and objective elements in it [10].
The network attributes, for example, the importance of received signal strength and bandwidth are
objective in nature. Application related attributes such as delay, packet loss, and jitter show some
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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

objectivity. However, some studies have already revealed their potential subjective natures. For
example, a study conducted in Tanzania shows that the users give moderate importance to end-toend delay over packet loss [11]. The study by ETSI reveals that the users give strong importance
to end-to-end delay over packet loss [12]. Therefore, the importance of application-related
performance parameters can vary based on changing contexts, for example, between home and
industrial environments or urban and rural areas. The significance of applications can vary
depending on the context as well. For example, an application related to the education services
can have higher importance compared to one that provides some entertainment services.
Moreover, the absence or presence of an application will affect the weights of others in the
network.
For weight assignment, the available literature on QoS evaluation in network selection has mostly
used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, which is primarily developed by Saaty [7, 8,
13]. Some studies have also assigned fixed weights to these parameters based on their importance
to service performance [14]. Both AHP and fixed weight methods are unable to handle the
subjective and ambiguous factors related to weight determination such as context-based
significance. In this study, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) with the extent analysis
method is applied to bring the context-based information into the picture. This method is capable
of handling ambiguity in any particular subject. It is also possible to assign the weights
dynamically to the relevant parameters by using this method.

3. THE UNIFIED QOS METRIC MEASUREMENT FUNCTIONS

The quality of service on any network or application is usually evaluated through a set of specific
metrics. For example, to assess the performance of any voice application, the delay, jitter and
packet loss are measured and compared with the acceptable values of these parameters. Similarly,
the QoS of any network is evaluated through parameters such as delay, packet loss, throughput,
and available bandwidth. The presence of different types of communication technologies and
applications in a heterogeneous network makes its QoS assessment method a challenging task. To
deal with such challenges, this paper introduces unified metric measurement functions.
The QoS evaluation approach proposed in this work considers any heterogeneous network as a set
of three layers; these are the application layer, the radio access network layer and the network
configuration layer. Each of these layers uses a function to quantify a unified QoS metric, which
flows to the next layer and derive the combined metric of that layer. Figure 1 shows the flowchart
of the proposed approach. In the application layer, a function is defined to derive the QoS of each
application through a unified metric. This function combines the values of several applicationrelated performance metrics. As such, the QoS of a network-based application is treated as a
function of QoS-related parameters. This can be expressed as:

QoSAM A = f QP1 , QP2 ,..., QPp

(1)

where A denotes a network-based application, and QP refers to the QoS-related parameters. Then
in the radio access network layer or RAN layer, the QoS of each access network, which are
present in the network, is evaluated. This evaluation is conducted based on the performances of
the active applications in those access networks. Hence, the QoS of an access network is viewed
as a function of the application QoS metrics. It can be expressed as:

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

Figure 1. The concept of Unified QoS Metric

QoSRM R = f QoSAM A

i = (1,2 ,...., m )

(2)

where R denotes any radio access network, and i refers to the number of active applications
present on a network. Finally, to evaluate the QoS of the overall network configuration another
function is defined, which uses the radio access network metrics as its input. This can be
expressed as:

QoSCM = f QoSRM R

j = (1,2 ,...., n )

(3)

where j refers to the number of radio access networks present on a network.

Table 1.Example of Application Weight Calculation

Networks

N1

Considered Parameters

Weights

Application

Service

Number of
Users

A1

Education

20

A2

Entertainment

18

A1

Health

10

N2
A2

Education

A1

A2

w AN1

wBN1

w AN 2

wBN 2

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

4. THE APPLICATION WEIGHT CALCULATION ALGORITHM

The weights of applications are considered during the QoS evaluation of radio access networks.
The radio access network metric can be used to label a network as a particular service-oriented
network such as education or health by integrating the application weights. For instance, if the
QoS metric of a radio access network that is mainly used for health services, is always good, then
that network can be taken as a suitable health service-oriented one for future use.
The importance of the applications is subject to change depending on the requirements of
particular networks. The service operators can update these criteria according to their particular
circumstances. The criteria for this study have been formulated using the studies relevant to
distance education-based service models [15]. For instance, in these service models,
Videoconferencing (VC) bears more significance compared to voice-based applications. On the
other hand, in a more general sense, VC may be less significant than voice-based applications as
the latter is more easily amiable to the users. Therefore, the criteria to decide the applications
weights in this regard can be the number of users using the application and the purpose and the
context of that application usage.
Table 1 shows the example of two networks, N1 and N 2 , which have applications A1 and A2 with
different number of users. The application weights are expressed as w AN11 , w AN12 , w BN11 , and wBN22 . In
this paper, the weights of these applications are defined based on two criteria, the importance of
the service, to which it belongs, and the number of users using that application. Other evaluation
rules can be integrated based on individual needs. In the network N1 , it is considered
that w AN11 > w BN11 . This is determined depending on the fact that in the network N1 , the application
A1 is used by more users than the application A2 as the application A1 is used for educational
services, whereas, the application A2 is used for entertainment services. Therefore, when the QoS
metric in the network N1 is calculated considering these application weights, the QoS metric
value reflects the significance of the service the application provides. As a result, if the QoS value
is good for the application A2 and poor for the application A1 , the outcome of the QoS level of
the network will be poor. That is because, the majority of the users in that network experience
poor performance for a valuable service. If, in any case, the entertainment service application has
more users, the result will also be same as the education service is set to have higher significance
than the entertainment service. These findings can change based on specific network
requirements.

On the other hand, the Network N 2 supports both education and health services. As more users
are using the health services compared to the education services, the application weight of A1 is
greater than A2 , w AN12 > wBN22 . If the QoS value of the network N 2 is good, then it can be
categorized as a health service-oriented network. Therefore, the configurations of N 2 can be
recommended for any network that aims to deploy network-based health services in the future.
Service operators can input these criteria to change the weights dynamically for any network.
The weight calculation involves two steps. At first, the alternatives, criteria, and the fuzzy
judgement matrix are defined. Then in the second step, the actual weight is calculated based on
those
measures.
FAHP-based
calculations
include:
establishing
a
set
of
alternatives X = {x1 , x2 ,........, xm } , a set of goal or evaluation criteria G = {g1 , g 2 ,........, g n } , a fuzzy
judgement matrix (FJM), with elements
that represents the relative importance of each pair of
criteria i and j, and a weighting vector w = ( w1 , w2 ,......, wn ) . Both steps involve the concept of
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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

Triangular Fuzzy Number (TFN) and fuzzy addition and multiplication operations. To derive the
FJM for the first step the importance scale presented in Table 2 is used. It shows the TFN
and
are the lower, upper and the middle value
Kt = ( lt , mt , ut ) where t=1, 2,, 9, and ,
respectively. Table 3 shows the pair-wise comparison matrix for VC,
of the fuzzy number
voice, and VS applications formed based on the cited studies. The importance scale of Table 2 is
used for the comparisons. If one of the applications is absent from the network, these pair-wise
comparison matrices are subject to change.
For the second step of FAHP, different methods are proposed. The most prominent one is
Changs extent analysis method [16]. This method is chosen as it provides easy and flexible
options for the weight calculation. The steps of the extent analysis method are as follows:
At first, the sums of the each row of the defined fuzzy comparison matrix are calculated. Then the
normalization of the row sums is conducted using fuzzy multiplication to obtain fuzzy synthetic
analysis. Therefore, in the fuzzy comparison matrix, the fuzzy synthetic analysis of criteria
of
is calculated as:
alternative

(4)
where i , j = {1, 2, 3.............n} and n is the number of criteria. In step 2, in order to rank the criteria
against each alternative, the degree of possibility of two fuzzy numbers is applied. Therefore,
X
X
DG m (l2 , m2 , u2 ) DG m (l1 , m1 , u1 ) is computed by the following equation:
2
1
Table 2. A FAHP-based Pair-wise Comparison Importance Scale

Fuzzy Numbers

Definition

k1 (l1, m1, u1 )

Equal importance

Triangular Fuzzy
Number
(1,1,1)

k2 (l2 , m2 , u2 )

Intermediate values

(1/2,3/4,1)

k3 (l3 , m3 , u3 )

Moderate importance

(2/3,1,3/2)

k4 ( l4 , m4 , u4 )

Intermediate values

(1,3/2,2)

k5 ( l5 , m5 , u5 )

Strong importance

(3/2,2,5/2)

k6 ( l6 , m6 , u6 )

Intermediate values

(2,5/2,3)

k7 ( l7 , m7 , u7 )

Very strong importance

(5/2,3,7/2)

k8 ( l8 , m8 , u8 )

Intermediate values

(3,7/2,4)

k9 ( l9 , m9 , u9 )

Extreme importance

(7/2,4,9/2)

V DGX m DGX m = sup min X m ( x ) , D X m ( y )

2
1
G2
DG1

(5)

It can be also expressed as:

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016
X
X
V D GX m D GX m = hgt D m D m
2
1
G
G
2
1

D Xm (d )
G2

if
m1 m 2
1

=
0
if
l1 l 2

l2 u 2
otherwise

( m 2 u 2 ) ( m1 l1 )

(6)

and
X
X
V DGX m DGX m = hgt D m D m
1
2
G2
G1

D X m ( d )
G1

1
if
m1 m2

=
if
l2 u1
0

l2 u1
otherwise

( m1 u1 ) ( m2 l2 )

(7)

Table 3. Pair-wise Comparison Matrix for different Applications

Applications
VC

Voice

VS

Criteria

VC

Voice

Purpose
of Usage
Number
of Users
Purpose
of Usage
Number
of Users

(1, 1, 1)

(3/2,2,5/2)

(1, 1, 1)

(2/3,1,3/2)

Purpose
of Usage
Number
of Users

(2/5,1/2,2/3)

(0.54,
0.75,
1.09)

(2/3,1,3/2)
(2/3, 1,3/2)

(1.09,
1.5,
2)

(1, 1, 1)

(2/3,1,
(0.84,
3/2)
1.25,
(1,3/2,2) 0.75)
(2/3,1,
3/2)
(5/2,3,
7/2)

(1, 1, 1)

(0.59,
0.84,
1.25)

(1/2,2/3,1)

VS

(2/3,1,3/2)
(2/7,1/3,2/5)

(0.48,
0.67,
0.95)

(1.59,
2,
2.5)

(1, 1, 1)
(1, 1, 1)

where d is the ordinate to validate if the highest intersection point D is between

D X m and D X m . Both the values of V ( DGX

G
G
2

DGX m
1

) and V

X
DG m
1

DGX2m are required to compare

D X m and D X m . For large numbers of criteria, the degree of possibility is applied as:
G
G
2

V DGXm DGXm , DGXm ,.............., DGXm = V DGXm DGXm and DGXm DGXm and..... DGXm DGXm
1
2
3
n
1
2
1
3
1
n
= minV

d GX1m

d GXnm

(8)

Assume that d CGXnm = minV d GX1m d GXnm

In step 3, the weight vector w for each alternative is calculated. This is obtained as:

( ( ) ( )

w'm = d CGX m , d CGX m ,..........., d CGX m

1

))

(9)
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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

In step 4, the normalized weight vector is calculated for each alternative as:

( (

) (

w m = d CGX m , d CGX m ,...................., d CGX m

1

))

Xm
Xm
Xm
d (CG1 ) , d (CG2 ) ,........, d (CGn )
=
n X n X
n X
CGnm
CGnm CGnm
j =1

j =1
j =1

(10)

The weight vector of the considered applications is calculated as:

w 'A ( VC,Voice,VS ) = (1,

0.94,

0.56 )

The normalization weight vector is as follows:

w A = ( wVC , wVoice , wVS ) = ( 0.4,0.38,0.224 )

5. SIMULATION STUDIES
This section presents some simulation studies and result analysis to investigate the impact of
various factors on the performance of network-based applications which justify the concept of
unified metrics. The factors, which are considered, are different environments, the presence of
different traffic types in each RAN, and the number of active users in each RAN.
Figure 2 shows the average packet loss for 20 simultaneous voice calls in the UMTS network for
different environments. In this case, the rural outdoor calls experience the highest amount of
packet loss and the medium city outdoor calls experience the lowest amount of average packet
loss. The small city outdoor calls experience 0.47% more packet loss than the medium city
outdoor calls. In the mixed small city urban environment, when the calls take place between the
outdoor and indoor office environment experience 5.68 % and 6.61% more packet loss than the
urban indoor calls and the urban outdoor calls respectively. The rural outdoor calls experience
15.55% more packet loss than the small city outdoor calls.

Figure 2. Average Packet Loss for 20 Voice calls in the UMTS Network
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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

Figure 3 shows the average packet loss experienced by calls in different urban environments. The
calls in the medium city (MC) outdoor environment undergo the lowest amount of packet loss.

Figure 3. Average Packet loss for 20 Simultaneous Calls in Urban Environments

The pedestrian environment calls experience around 0.21% more packet loss than the calls in the
urban indoor environment. The urban indoor calls experience around 1.4% and 0.93% more
packet loss than the small and the medium city outdoor calls respectively.
In the next stage of the simulations, the values of QoS-related parameters are analysed for the VS
clients. The VS clients are placed on a UMTS network in the rural outdoor area, and the server is
on a WiMAX network in an urban outdoor area. Figure 4 shows the packet loss that the clients
experience in different environments. The second VS client in the rural outdoor environment
experiences a 0.22% more packet loss than the VS client in the urban outdoor. The third VS client
in the rural outdoor environment experiences a 0.31% packet loss than the client in the urban
outdoor. These clients experience almost the same packet loss for the urban indoor and the urban
outdoor environments.

Figure 4. Packet loss for VS Clients in the UMTS-WiMAX Network

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

Then the impacts of technology, service, and the number of user-related factors on the application
and network performance are analysed. Figure 5 shows the comparison of average packet loss for
different number of voice calls. For eight new calls in the network, the callers in the rural outdoor
environment experience 8.91% more average packet loss. In the small city outdoor environments,
this loss is increased by 2.54%. Table 4 presents the percentage of increased packet loss for each
environment.

Figure 5. Impact of Number of Users on Average Packet loss in Different Environments

The above-discussed simulation result analysis show that in the wireless networks the application
performance is affected by different factors. These factors could be environment, technology,
network architecture, or traffic related. The results also illustrate that it is difficult to define any
acceptable fixed value for these parameters due to involvement of multiple factors. Therefore, an
acceptable range is more suitable which would consider all relevant factors and unified metric
measurement oriented functions.
Table 4.QoS Parameters for VS Clients

Path loss Model

Average
Packet Loss

Average Endto-end Delay

(msec)

Average Delay
Variation (msec)

5.72

314.5

6.89

5.61

314.2

7.00

Client side

Server side

Rural
outdoor
Urban
outdoor

Urban
outdoor
Urban
outdoor

Urban
indoor

Rural
outdoor

6.15

Rural
outdoor

Suburban
outdoor

6.21

314.5

314.4

6.89

6.87

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

6. MEASURING THE IMPACT OF APPLICATION IMPORTANCE

This section evaluates the impacts of dynamic application weights on the unified QoS metrics.
The performance of a few network-based service models have been analyzed using the fixed
weight-based method in our previous work [17]. In this work, a detailed analysis is conducted to
present the effects of dynamic weights on the performance of the same service models. The
weights are calculated for each application according to the changing circumstances of the
network. These weights are entered as inputs to derive the network QoS metric.
In the previous work, the voice application is set to have a higher importance than the VS
application and the weights have been fixed as 0.6 and 0.4. In this work, those weights are set to
change based on the pair-wise comparison matrices presented in Table 3. Figure 6 shows the QoS
analysis of the scenario with twelve voice calls and one VS session on the network. The figure
clearly indicates that when the voice and VS applications have equal importance, the access
network has a good QoS level (e.g. 0.81). It shows an average QoS level (e.g. 0.62) for voice and
a good QoS level (e.g. 1) for VS. When the importance level of voice application has been
changed from having equal to extreme importance over VS application, the access network QoS
comes down to an average value of 0.63. Although, the performance of the VS application is
good, because of having a lower importance, it has less effect on the network QoS level. On the
other hand, the voice application, being extremely important, has a greater impact on the network
QoS level.

Figure 7. The Effect of Application Importance on the Network Performance

Figure 7 shows a similar type of analysis with the altered importance of voice and VS
applications. When the VS application has extreme importance, the network QoS improves due to
the impact of application weights on the network performance.

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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

Figure 8. Network Performance Analysis with changing Application Importance

Figure 9. The Performance Analysis with different Application Significance

Figure 8 illustrates the QoS in a voice-based network for different number of calls when the
importance of the application changes. When the VC application has extreme and moderate
importance over voice application respectively, the network shows a poor QoS level. The reason
is that the VC application with ten and twenty voice calls on the network experience a poor
quality. On the other hand, the network takes an average QoS level with ten and twenty voice
calls when the voice application has moderate and extreme importance over VC application
respectively.
Figure 9 shows the QoS in the UMTS-WiMAX network for different number of calls when the
significance of the application changes. When the VC application has extreme importance and
moderate importance over voice application respectively, the network shows a poor QoS level.
The reason is that the VC application with ten and twenty voice calls on the network experience a
poor quality. On the other hand, the network takes an average QoS level with ten and twenty
voice calls when the voice application has moderate and extreme importance over VC application
respectively.
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International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.1, January 2016

The above-discussed analyses clearly indicate that using application importance the QoS level
can be adjusted to reflect the service-centric performance of any network. If an important
application in a network experiences poor QoS, the overall network is recognized to have a poor
performance regardless of the performance of other applications. In this way, the user experience
or QoE can be integrated into the network QoS level as well. If the users experience poor
performance for an important application, the overall network QoS reflects a lower QoS level.
Therefore, it is easy to figure out the application for which the network is experiencing a poor
performance.

7. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, an application-based QoS analysis method has been proposed and evaluated. In
assessing the overall QoS level of a heterogeneous network, the levels of importance of
applications are included as weights. The key contributions of this work include the proposing of
a methodical approach for calculating and applying these weights using the concept of unified
metric measurement functions. Extensive simulation studies, utilizing these weights for QoS
assessment of various heterogeneous configurations supporting a variety of applications, have
also been carried out. These studies demonstrate how the inclusion of the application importance
weights for QoS evaluations, can assist in a systemic choosing of a fitting network configuration.
In our future works, we intend to include several other factors that can influence the QoS
provisions of a heterogeneous network supporting real-time applications.

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AUTHORS
Farnaz Farid is pursuing her PhD degree in Information Technology and Communications at the Western
Sydney University. Prior to that she has worked in China as a web application developer and web business
SME at IBM. Her research interests include wireless and cellular networking, web engineering, and
technology for development.
Seyed Shahrestani completed his PhD degree in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University
of Sydney. He joined Western Sydney University in 1999, where he is currently a Senior Lecturer. He is
also the head of the Networking, Security and Cloud Research (NSCR) group at Western Sydney
University. Chun Ruan received her PhD degree in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of
Western Sydney. Currently she is a lecturer in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at
Western Sydney University. Prior to that, she worked as an associate professor, lecturer and associate
lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China.

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