‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.’

It’s been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell said these immortal words on the first ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between 10 March 1876 and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that was the sole preserve of science fiction.

When the world’s first modern mobile telephone network was launched in 1979, there were just over 300 million telephones. Today, there are more than eight billion, most of which are mobile. Most people in most countries can now contact each other in a matter of seconds. Soon we’ll all be connected, to each other, and to complex computer networks that provide us with instant information, but also observe and record our actions. No other phenomenon touches so many of us, so directly, each and every day of our lives.

This book describes how this transformation came about. It considers the technologies that underpin telecommunications – microcircuits, fibre-optics and satellites – and touches on financial aspects of the industry: privatisations, mergers and takeovers that have helped shape the $2-trillion telecom market. But for the most part, it’s a story about us and our need to communicate.

Soft-Switching Technology for Three-phase Power Electronics Converters Discover foundational and advanced topics in soft-switching technology, including ZVS three-phase conversion In Soft-Switching Technology for Three-phase Power Electronics Converters, an expert team of researchers delivers a comprehensive exploration of soft-switching three-phase converters for applications including renewable energy and distribution power systems, AC power sources, UPS, motor drives, battery chargers, and more. The authors begin with an introduction to the fundamentals of the technology, providing the basic knowledge necessary for readers to understand the following articles. The book goes on to discuss three-phase rectifiers and three-phase grid inverters. It offers prototypes and experiments of each type of technology. Finally, the authors describe the impact of silicon carbide devices on soft-switching three-phase converters, studying the improvement in efficiency and power density created via the introduction of silicon carbide devices. Throughout, the authors put a special focus on a family of zero-voltage switching (ZVS) three-phase converters and related pulse width modulation (PWM) schemes. The book also includes: A thorough introduction to soft-switching techniques, including the classification of soft-switching for three phase converter topologies, soft-switching types and a generic soft-switching pulse-width-modulation known as Edge-Aligned PWM A comprehensive exploration of classical soft-switching three-phase converters, including the switching of power semiconductor devices and DC and AC side resonance Practical discussions of ZVS space vector modulation for three-phase converters, including the three-phase converter commutation process In-depth examinations of three-phase rectifiers with compound active clamping circuits Perfect for researchers, scientists, professional engineers, and undergraduate and graduate students studying or working in power electronics, Soft-Switching Technology for Three-phase Power Electronics Converters is also a must-read resource for research and development engineers involved with the design and development of power electronics.

Traffic Anomaly Detection presents an overview of traffic anomaly detection analysis, allowing you to monitor security aspects of multimedia services. The author's approach is based on the analysis of time aggregation adjacent periods of the traffic. As traffic varies throughout the day, it is essential to consider the concrete traffic period in which the anomaly occurs. This book presents the algorithms proposed specifically for this analysis and an empirical comparative analysis of those methods and settle a new information theory based technique, named "typical day analysis".

The communication field is evolving rapidly in order to keep up with society's demands. As such, it becomes imperative to research and report recent advancements in computational intelligence as it applies to communication networks. The Handbook of Research on Recent Developments in Intelligent Communication Application is a pivotal reference source for the latest developments on emerging data communication applications. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as satellite communication, cognitive radio networks, and wireless sensor networks, this book is ideally designed for engineers, professionals, practitioners, upper-level students, and academics seeking current information on emerging communication networking trends.

Bio-inspired computation, especially those based on swarm intelligence, has become increasingly popular in the last decade. Bio-Inspired Computation in Telecommunications reviews the latest developments in bio-inspired computation from both theory and application as they relate to telecommunications and image processing, providing a complete resource that analyzes and discusses the latest and future trends in research directions. Written by recognized experts, this is a must-have guide for researchers, telecommunication engineers, computer scientists and PhD students.

With the rapid progress in networking and computing technologies, a wide variety of network-based computing applications have been developed and deployed on the internet. Flexible and effective service provisioning for supporting the diverse applications is a key requirement for the next generation internet. However, the current internet lacks sufficient capability for meeting this requirement, mainly due to the ossification caused by tight coupling between network architecture and infrastructure. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which has been widely adopted in cloud computing via the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigms, may be applied in networking to decouple network architecture and infrastructure; thus offering a promising approach to addressing some fundamental challenges to the next generation Internet. In general, such a service-oriented networking paradigm is referred to as Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). This book presents the state of the art of the NaaS paradigm, including its concepts, architecture, key technologies, applications, and development directions for future network service provisioning. It provides readers with a comprehensive reference that reflects the most current technical developments related to NaaS.

Are Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) helpful or detrimental to the process of design? According to Aristotle, the imagination is a mental power that assists logical, sound judgments. Design, therefore, incorporates both reason and imagination. Challenging ICT Applications in Architecture, Engineering, and Industrial Design Education posits imagination as the central feature of design. It questions the common assumption that ICTs are not only useful but also valuable for the creation of the visual designs that reside at the core of architecture, engineering design, and industrial design. For readers who believe this assumption is right, this book offers an alternative perspective.