The LiveLabs is an innovation platform for developing and testing advanced technologies for large-scale, spatially-distributed behavioral testbeds, embedded in multiple real-world public spaces.
These testbeds enable both network infrastructure companies and consumer-driven products/service companies to explore the cyclic dependency between a) the capabilities and features of an advanced telco infrastructure and b) advanced the lifestyle-oriented digital applications and services that leverage upon such an ICT infrastructure. More specifically, LiveLabs provides the following benefits:
- On the Infrastructure side, LiveLabs helps telcos optimize their significant investments of new technology upgrades (e.g., femtos, LTE) by building technologies for a ‘usage adaptive heterogeneous network’, where
- user activity context can be monitored at fine granularity and
- such context is used to dynamically coordinate multiple access infrastructures (e.g., femtos, LTE, WiFi), at time scales of seconds, to address sudden localized data consumption spikes & mobility-driven computing demands. LiveLabs facilitates the deployment of such technologies by providing insight into how real consumers utilize such advanced capabilities as part of their daily lifestyles.
- On the Services side, LiveLabs provides retailers, service providers and applications developers a living testbed where they can test high-bandwidth, multimedia-oriented experimental Apps and services on real consumers in the real world. Unlike many other testbeds, LiveLabs is unique from other testbeds as
- it provides such Apps and services with much deeper, finer-grained human context (e.g., location, activity) than currently possible, and
- it exposes an automated provisioning service that frees such experimenters from many of the related chores (such as subject selection, privacy enforcement etc.).
Imagine a café, Coffee$, that dreams up an innovative new offering—for groups of 5 or more customers who visit their store. Coffee$ offers a promotion of 30% off on the coffee bill+ 15 minutes of HD-quality multi-player gaming among the group members on their mobile devices. Today, experimentation with such a service would not be possible because a) a telco T-Hub would be unable to offer such a dynamic high-bandwidth service within the mall or store, especially during busy periods, as it is not sure if the investment is justified, and b) absent this, Coffee$ would not be able to test how users responded in real-life to this offer.
