The CSSA and IFIP (International Federation of Information Processing) Technical Committee 6 (TC 6 - Communications Systems) successfully hosted Africom 2001 recently.
This year`s event, the fifth of its kind, was held in Cape Town in May, and speakers from countries as far a field as Australia, Canada, Europe and the US presented their technical research relevant to current issues in telecommunications.
Novel methods to address issues in mobile and wireless networks were offered by many speakers. Hisashi Kobayashi (School of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University and former director of the Tokyo Research laboratory) described a new technique to be employed by a proxy server acting as a gateway between mobile wireless clients and Internet servers.
Errol Gelenbe (Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Central University of Florida, US) presented results on Cognitive Packet Networks -- an attempt at addressing the many issues that the new generation of multimedia Internet traffic will present. The same theme was followed by Tony Krzesinski and co-workers from the University of Stellenbosch.
UMTS Cons 3G Networks were also high on the agenda, with Michiel L"otter of San Diego discussing implementation and application matters of UMTS.
Specifically he showed that the key to a successful 3G service will be the ability of the underlying silicon platform to support new and advance applications such as Java.
Equally practical was the description by Andy Shearman and Pieter Kritzinger (of the University of Cape Town) of a software bed for the diagnosis of GSM Network error, using a database of monitored data.
Also participating in the conference was Martin Reiser, Director of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for two consecutive years.
The three-day event ended with meetings of the IFIP TC 6 in Computer Networks and a closed joint workshop on the performance of Telecommunication Computer Networks.
Africom 2001 was yet another IFIP event held in SA, following last year`s TC 9 event, and formed a vital part of the CSSA`s strategy to continue to bring more international events of this kind to SA.
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