Editorial: Special Issue on Global ICT Standardisation Forum for India (GISFI)
Balamuralidhar P, TCS Innovation Labs, Bangalore, India
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It ismygreat pleasure to introduce this special issue focusing on the contributions from
Global ICT Standardisation Forum for India (GISFI). The Global ICT Standardization
Forum for India (GISFI),has been making noteworthy contributions towards Indian
standardization in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
as applicable to areas, such as energy, healthcare, security and green technologies.
The effort of GISFI to create a synergy and coherence for the efforts from India in the
world standardization process has been strengthened with the collaboration of various
international standards bodies. GISFI has put special efforts to bring academia also
into the standardization stream along with industry from diverse strata of the society.
Further, there is afocus on strengthening the ties among leading and emerging scholars
and institutions in India and the world around; to develop and cultivate a research
and development agenda for the ICT field. The working groups organized in GISFI
have attracted participation from academia, business, and Government/policy-making
entities.
In this special issue we bring forth papers reporting the guiding thoughts and
key contributions from each of the work groups authored by the leading contributors.
Major contributions are from the following work groups.
- Spectrum Issues
- Security and Privacy
- Cloud and Service Oriented Networks (CSeON)
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Green ICT (GICT)
- Future Radio Networks
- Special Interest Group
This special issue opens up with a vision paper from the founding chairman
of GISFI on the potentially high impact of emerging technologies for 5G wireless
communications. Interoperability, ubiquity and dynamism are identified to be the key
features of 5G networks. Further the current activities and future directions for a
special interest group for 5G in GISFI are outlined.
Wireless spectrum is an important national resource and it faces pressure due to
the extreme user densities and diversity of technologies deployed. Efficient spectrum
management is in the focus and there are two papers included on this. The first one is
on Spectrum Challenges for Modern Services summarizing the deliberations of SpectrumWork
group on improving spectrum utilization through spectrum sharing. In the
second paper on "SpectrumTrading in India and 5G" authors discuss a comprehensive
view on spectrum trading in the Indian context.
Today telecommunications has become the lifeline of human society and supporting
structure to economy. Safety and Security is of paramount importance. Moreover
the privacy of information exchange needs to be respected. The works of security and
privacy workgroup in this space is presented in "Security and Privacy".
The "National Telecom Policy 2012"has identified Cloud and Service Oriented
Networks as an integral part of the convergence strategy laid out by Government
of India. Understanding the infrastructure requirements and identifying gaps are of
national interest. In the paper "Cloud and Service Oriented Networks (CSeON)" the
authors summarize the contributions and achievements of the CSeON work group on
this topic.
Imparting energy efficiency in systems through the adoption of wide-ranging
spectrum of environmentally friendly technologies that power the connected information
infrastructure is another area of focus. In the paper "Green Information and
Communication Technology Standards Development: An Indian Perspective" the
authors present the contributions and collaborative activities GICT Working Group
(WG) in this space.The contribution on metrics and methods of measurement for
energy efficiency of telecommunication equipments is very relevant from Indian
context.
Tracking and managing carbon emission in telecommunication systems is an
important activity under Green ICT. A techno-managerial perspective to estimate
carbon emission in Indian Telecom networks is brought up in the paper "Carbon
Emission Estimation & Reduction in Indian Telecom Operations". Further the author
goes forward to propose a solution framework to address this objective.
Another important disruptive influence on ICT and its applications is from the
vision of "Internet of Things (IoT)". Its potential impact on different facets of human
life has been widely recognized. The paper titled "Lightweight platforms for Internet
of Things" presents the works of IoT workgroup in this topic. The contributions from
the IoT workgroup are majorly towards identifying relevant applications from the
context of India and conceptualizing a unified service platform for supporting them.
In a second paper on this topic the author discusses interoperability aspects of some
of the key IoT standards and presents how that study has contributed to shapeup the
platform architecture in GISFI IoT WG.
I would like to thank all the authors of this special issue for their contributions.
Also grateful to all the reviewers for their timely expert reviews.I am sure that the
dissemination of some of the selected works of GISFI work groups through this special
issue will encourage more ICT experts from academia, businesses and administration
to contribute and address some of the national challenges though ICT standardisation.
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