Instructor:
Jogen K Pathak, Varaha systems Inc.
Sajal K. Das, CReWMaN, The University of Texas at Arlington
Giridhar D. Mandyam, Nokia Research Center

Abstract:
Success of Wi-Fi and emergence of Wi-MAX creates exciting technology and business challenges for communication industry. The roaming, seamless voice and data hand-offs, in conjunction with continuity of services such as Messaging, Push-to-talk, Voicemail, and others, also referred to as "Services Convergence", are posing the next technology and business challenges. Services convergence among Wi-Fi, Wi-MAX, and Cellular networks is creating opportunities for both wireless, and wireline service providers. Similar opportunity exists for enterprises for the first time. Services convergence can give enterprises the freedom similar to "PBX"es for wireless access on and off campuses.
As the business cases for enterprises and wireline service providers are pitted against each other on the commercial front, the technologies will evolve out of market leverage, presence and acceptance. This poses a challenge for technologists to create a technology for roaming, handoffs and continuity of other services such as Messaging, Push-to-talk, voicemail, and others; that is easily deployable in each scenario. The requirement exist for a solution that, independently of the end user and service providing entity, can fulfill the "service quality" expectations of users and providers.
In this tutorial, we discuss the requirements of Services convergence solutions, protocols, standardization effort, and challenges for solution development. We also allude to the opportunities for research and development of newer technologies. These innovations will breach the current gaps in convergence of services beyond packet to circuit call control mechanisms and extend them across different access technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Wi-MAX, GSM, CDMA, and others.

Instructor Bios:
Jogen K Pathak leads Varaha Systems, where he is responsible for shaping the Wireless services convergence industry through innovative networking technology solutions to meet the immediate and long-term need of the wireless industry. Mr. Pathak served as Chief Technology Officer of Cyneta Networks where he was responsible for the leading edge research activities in the mobile data space. A seasoned technology management veteran, Pathak brings more than 14 years of experience in cellular, PCS, and fixed wireless network architecture design. Prior to founding MobileTop (later Cyneta Networks), Pathak held various technology development and management positions at Nortel Networks. During his tenure, his team created a network offering for MMDS wireless DSL (now 802.16) to support Voice, data, and back office integration. He also participated in development of the GSM to AMPS roaming integration product and then led the product through a Nortel start-up initiative. Working for Intel, Pathak applied his networking and software expertise to solve Intel's real time communication challenges.

Sajal K. Das is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and also the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Prior to 1999, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Texas (UNT), Denton where he founded the Center for Research in Wireless Computing (CReW) in 1997, and also served as the Director of the Center for Research in Parallel and Distributed Computing (CRPDC) during 1995-97. Dr. Das is a recipient of the UNT Student Association's Honor Professor Award in 1991 and 1997 for best teaching and scholarly research; UNT's Developing Scholars Award in 1996 for outstanding research; UTA's Outstanding Faculty Research Award in Computer Science in 2001 and 2003; and the UTA College of Engineering Research Excellence Award in 2003. An internationally-known computer scientist, he has visited numerous universities, research organizations, government and industry labs worldwide for collaborative research and invited seminar talks. He is also frequently invited as a keynote or tutorial speaker at international conferences and symposia.
Dr. Das' current research interests include resource and mobility management in wireless networks, mobile and pervasive computing, wireless multimedia and QoS provisioning, sensor networks, mobile internet architectures and protocols, parallel processing, grid computing, performance modeling and simulation. He has published over 250 research papers in these areas, directed numerous industry and government funded projects, and holds four US patents in wireless mobile networks. He received the Best Paper Awards in the 5th Annual ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'99), 16th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-16), 3rd ACM International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM 2000), and 11th ACM

Giridhar D. Mandyam is the Director of the Radio Systems Group in the Radio Communications Laboratory of Nokia Research Center. Born in Dallas, Texas, Giri received the BSEE degree (Magna Cum Laude) from Southern Methodist University in 1989, the MSEE degree from the University of Southern California in 1993, and the PhD EE degree from the University of New Mexico in 1996. At SMU he was a University Scholar and Hyer Society Scholar.   While at USC he was a Teaching Assistant in the Signal and Image Processing Institute, and at UNM he studied under a NASA Fellowship.   From 1989 to 1994 Dr. Mandyam held positions with Rockwell International and Qualcomm Inc. In April 1996, he joined the Wireless Business Unit at Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, to work primarily on CDMA chipsets. In September 1998, he joined Nokia Research Center (NRC) in Dallas as a Senior Research Engineer. He became a Principal Scientist in June 2000 and Research Manager of the Wireless Data Access group in NRC-Dallas in June 2001.   While at NRC, Giri has continued his participation in CDMA standardization work, which he started in 1997 while still at Texas Instruments. He was a contributor to the development of the cdma2000 wireless standard. He was also instrumental in development of Nokia's proposal for 3GPP2's 1X-EV-DV standardization effort. More recently, he has lead efforts in building experimental radios for evolutionary wireless systems, and participated in research into "Beyond 3G" technologies.    Dr. Mandyam is inventor or co-inventor of six issued US patents.    He has also published over 50 conference and journal papers, and 4 book chapters. In addition, he was a guest editor for a special issue of the Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing entitled "3G Wireless Communications and Beyond" (August 2002).   He is a co-author of the text Third-Generation CDMA Systems for Enhanced Data Services (Academic Press, 2002).   Moreover, he is an adjunct Full Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.   Dr. Mandyam is a Senior Member of the IEEE.