Adnan Ashraf, Yousaf Raheel, Muhammad Adeel, Muhammad A Khalil

The soft drinks market is the third largest revenue participant of the Central Board of Revenue in terms of sales tax and excise duties. Pakistani beverage market has been growing since its inception. With several local and international companies interested in this lucrative business, this paper attempts to provide a much sought-after insight into various aspects of Pakistani consumer market by providing a consumer engagement and segment multimedia strategy for a future beverage product as a case study. The theories on consumer engagement and their application in perspective of Pakistani society, and a detailed analysis of considerable factors in consumer engagement in context of segment multimedia strategy are the highlights of this work. Although focused on Pakistani market, this case study is perfectly applicable in context of other Asian and African countries with similar socio-culture environment. 

Babar Zaman, Mohammad A Shahzad

Before devising a strategy, it is requisite to perform the internal and external analysis of the company to better understand its market position. This paper aims to provide a detailed assessment of the UK retailer Sainsbury’s through PEST analysis, Porter’s Five Force model, SWOT analysis, 7S model and a brief financial position analysis. The research will not only help identify the current position and future opportunities for Sainsbury’s but will also help identify the performance variables through which other UK retailers could be assessed in future.

Adnan Ashraf, Yousaf Raheel, Muhammad Adeel

Over the years, tourism industry has remained a key player in Pakistani economy. It has although seen its worst downfall in history due to the incidents of terrorism in the past 15 years, in the recent years, this industry is on the rise/booming again. Airline industry has played a key role in connecting far-flung tourist heavens of Pakistan to the mainland. After researching the Pakistani airline industry, this work provides a preliminary marketing plan for a proposed commercial helicopter service for a leading airline in Pakistan. The paper includes a comprehensive internal and external analysis of the airline to assess the feasibility of the proposed service. Besides providing a situation analysis, this paper also includes a detailed 4 Ps analysis, and an evaluation of value addition for the consumer in the proposed marketing strategy.

Muhammad Arsalan

In this paper we aim at discussing various strategies adopted by teachers in order to help a child with dyslexia cope with challenges in the class. The time spent in attaining education plays a significant part in a child’s development. For a teacher, aiding a dyslexic child is a wonderful as well as challenging task. Dyslexic learners have learning differences due to which they cannot hold information for long and may not be able to grasp the information at all. It is important to understand that a dyslexic learner neither lacks intelligence nor willfulness, only constant support provided by mentors can help them learn and achieve. This paper is aimed at reviewing a wide range of strategies that could act as guidelines for tutors and equip them with necessary skills to help the learners with dyslexia in different age groups learn and achieve.

Muhammad Rizwan

Operational management lies at the core of a company’s management. It ensures that the business processes, finance, and the technology in the company is managed affectively to help realise the company’s vision and mission. This paper provides an overview of the financial management, the human resource management aspects of operational management, and information system management of Tesco, a UK retailer.

Munir Hussain

The fast spreading of wireless technology services are more focusing on businesses area rather than targeting customers. Even now, this advancement in the mobile technology continues to bang the international business market intensely, modern mobile technologies and their applications are more focusing the mobile business area. Today, the world of electronic transactions is switching from E-commerce to M-commerce. In order to solve critical issues in M-commerce it becomes vital to understand different concepts and technologies associated with M-commerce. The first part of this paper gives overview of M-commerce in terms of their characteristics, applications, and issues pertaining to it, including many critical issues such battery power consumption in M-commerce transactions. Battery is one of the most important and scarce resources in mobile devices thus to extend the mobile devices battery lifetime, it becomes important to save the battery resource as much as possible. The second part of this paper focuses on exploring various aspects of enabling mobile payment systems, mobile payment modes and characteristics and the payments system requirements. 

Azhar Khan

This paper provides an evaluation of the past, present, and future strategic plans of Vodafone. To design any strategy for the future, it is imperative to analyse the important parts of strategic plans of the company in the past. Thus, in this work, we provide a detailed analysis of Vodafone’s strategic plan for the past decade. Similarly, to identify the aspects of strategic importance for Vodafone in the present times, this work provides an overview of the key components of the current strategic plan of Vodafone. Finally, based on the study of the past and present strategies, and critical variables affecting telecom industry in general and Vodafone in particular, this work proposes some critical components of the future strategic plan for Vodafone. Based on the analysis, as part of this work, we also propose various improvements to the value chain of Vodafone.

Mohammad A. Shahzad

In this paper we aim at understanding the various problems encountered by a preschool teacher. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate root problems which are faced by teachers of all spectrums in kindergarten schools. We will also discuss different scenarios these super humans encounter in their day-to-day routine. It is often thought that teaching kids is fun, which is not always true. The toddlers have sudden mood swings, and this can be very irritating for teachers when they have to handle a big class full of kids who can’t handle themselves and find every solution in crying. Patience and engaging activities planned by teachers is the only way which helps them in class control. The other problems faced by them are related to curriculum planning, hectic paperwork, handling administration, working in alliance with parents, low pays, and most of all handling toddler’s behavior.

M Adeel, L N Tokarchuk, M A Azam, S K A Khan

MPeersim is a simulation environment for mobile and mobile P2P networks. It simulates different types of mobile nodes and communication technologies such as Bluetooth, MMS, and SMS. With a primary emphasis of evaluation of MPeersim in terms of simulation statistics, this paper will elaborate on various MPeersim functionalities in context of availability of generic, node, and network-specific simulation parameters, node and network-specific statistics available for various types of analyses, and on the capabilities of MPeersim in terms of presenting empirical data in different formats including graphs and visualisations for monitoring purposes. Providing a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between parameters and statistics will assist researchers in planning for developing simulation environments.

Munir Hussain, Khalid Khan

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technology is still immature and thus faces a variety of problems due to limited memory, CPU and battery power resources. WSNs are prone to active and passive attacks. While the former is capable of affecting minimal resources, the latter type of attack is difficult to launch but very powerful in terms of affecting critical resources. Most shared key security protocols used in WSNs are not scalable as they depend upon third party or KDC. Although in some situations this concept works well, besides reducing scalability, finding a trustworthy third party is also very difficult in KDC concept of key sharing. This paper gives a brief overview of WSNs, posed security threats to these networks and relevant security issues. This paper also brings in a novel key sharing model for traversing secret key in WSNs that does not depend on third party concept and hence it is a more scalable and secure.

Mehul Mehta

Market efficiency refers to the accuracy and quickness with which prices reflect market related information. Decisions of investment by an investor in a market is influenced by many factors, one of the most important is the market efficiency. Research reveals that if a market is efficient, it is extremely difficult to make excessive returns. In an efficient market there exist next to none undervalued securities. With the first stock exchange started functioning in 1875 Indian stock markets have been lucrative for the traders from around the world. This paper attempts to analyse the efficiency of the Indian capital markets. Research from the literature and the interviews of the renowned investors have been used to reach a conclusion. Some tips in context of investment strategy have also been provided.

Mehul Mehta

The efficient market hypothesis suggests that at any given time in a capital market, the prices of stock reflect all available information. Hypothesis implies that it is impossible to beat the market because the market price always incorporates all the relevant information that may influence the price of a stock. Some researchers, based on the historic evidence, contradict with this hypothesis, and challenge the presence of a perfect rationale behind the hypothesis. Behavioural finance on the other hand combines behavioural and cognitive psychological theory with economics and finance to provide explanations behind the irrational financial decisions investors make. Using these theories, behavioural finance explains stock market anomalies such as severe rises or falls in stock price. Behavioural finance assumes that both information structure and the characteristics of market investors influence investment decision of the individuals. This paper provides a thorough analysis of efficient market hypothesis and behavioural finance by considering the literature and market statistics.

Asghar Hussain, Muhammad Adeel

This paper explores the critical incidents in the classroom context, specifically addressing issues of lateness and absenteeism. The paper reflects on the impact of these classroom disruptions on teaching and learning and discusses potential strategies to address these disruptions. In this analysis we incorporate various learning theories, such as Dweck's theory of intelligence, and Keller's ARCS model of motivation. The paper emphasizes the importance of the relevance, attention, confidence, and satisfaction in sustaining student motivation. We propose that through reflective practice, we can enhance the teaching approaches and become more effective educators.

Imtiaz Khan

Mass media play a vital role in influencing citizens to have their perceptions and opinions shaped. However, there is relatively less evidence to confirm or reject the claims that the media promote or prevents conflict. This paper, intends to delve into exploring visual propaganda, spreading due to the mass media between the two sides in using images to promote their political agendas during the recent Syrian conflicts. A conflict that started with the arrest of a fourteen-year-old boy who sprayed anti-government slogans on a school wall, and the effect of instantaneous worldwide reporting on this strife. The major issue is to understand that whether the advancement of media in this digital age has made any significant changes in the role of media play in such confrontations.

Iftikhar Mehmood

The research paper provides insights into the sociology of race and ethnicity, investigating identity construction, historical underpinnings, and societal hierarchies. It discusses the changing definitions of race and ethnicity, the influence of migration on cultural belonging, and the power dynamics between minority and majority groups. Furthermore, it examines attitudes towards dual citizenship in the Netherlands, contextualizing them within notions of national identity and cultural acceptance. Through a comprehensive analysis, the paper sheds light on the complexities of racial and ethnic dynamics in contemporary society.

Munir Hussain, Khalid Khan

Security and Energy are important issues when wireless sensor network (WSN) is deployed in harsh environments. WSN security becomes real challenge for the researchers because these networks are vulnerable to security attacks due to the broadcast nature of transmission. Due to the limited memory, CPU, and battery power of sensor nodes, traditional asymmetric-key distribution protocols are expensive and rather infeasible. Thus, only a very few conventional protocols can readily be used in sensor networks and key management schemes should be designed carefully to reduce computations power over the sensor node as well. In this paper we analyse existing Key Management Protocols like SPINS, SEKEN, SNAKE, Security Architecture for Mobile WSNs and BROSK for their vulnerabilities against Denial-of-Service attacks. In WSNs, where the most protocols working on point-to-point handshaking procedures to negotiate link dependent keys, this influences the scalability of the network, we present a novel protocol SKEP to construct link dependent keys by unicasting. We also propose SEEKDP a security protocol that prevents certain attacks, distribute keys, exchange information in an efficient manner and provide security by consuming less energy of regular sensor node.

M Adeel, L N Tokarchuk, M A Azam, S K A Khan

Communication between mobiles using technologies like Bluetooth, MMS, SMS, Mobile and Home Broadband can increase their susceptibility to mobile security threats. In the past few years, mobile malware has emerged as one of the major threats for modern-day mobile devices. Since the first malware outbreak in 2004, hundreds of mobile viruses, worms, Trojans and spyware and over thousands of their variants have been discovered. With such a large number of ever-evolving malware, it is challenging to develop an electronic system capable of detecting such malware. In this work, the statistical data generated as a consequence of interactions on mobile devices and the mechanism of recording this data against statistical parameters on mobile devices is discussed. We also provide a detailed taxonomy of the low and high-order statistical parameters and discuss how these parameters (besides utilisation in other scenarios) can be affectively utilised in the detection of a variety of security attacks and malware types. 

Munir Hussain, Syed Usman Jamil

Today, mobile commerce flexibility has totally changed businesses in the world due to easy mobile-based online bookings and payments. Its implementation is not limited to any single area but it can be utilized in all sorts of situations and organizations in various ways. It can be utilized in banking, electronic publication distribution, online sales, online payments for different utility bills and online booking of airlines etc. These kinds of online booking, buying and selling, and their payment services are available to anyone 24/7 in the world. When using these types of facilities, one needs to understand and study different types of characteristics of this new technology i.e., it is important to understand different modes of payments, various technologies using mobile payment system, and different M-commerce payment protocols. As we know, energy consumption is a critical issue in M-commerce, so it is important to reduce battery power consumption as much as possible. In this paper, we will explore some of the most popular mobile payment protocols step-by-step to fully understand their working environment.

M Adeel, L N Tokarchuk, M A Azam, S K A Khan

Mobile malware has emerged as one of the major threats for modern day mobile networks. Since the first inception a decade ago, hundreds of types of mobile malware and their variants have been discovered. Interactions between mobile using technologies like Bluetooth, MMS, SMS, and mobile and home broadband, leave significant usage footprints on mobile devices. If acquired and processed, these footprints can be utilised for a variety of purposes including the detection of mobile malware. This work is aimed at introducing various behaviour parameters against which the footprints can be recorded, and the processing of these parameters to produce high-order parameters that can prove very effective in different types of devices and network-specific analysis including detection of malware. It is important to state that this work is limited to presenting a comprehensive taxonomy of behaviour parameters only, and a discussion on the mechanism of utilising the behaviour parameters in analysis such as detection of malware is beyond the scope of this work.

Iftikhar Mehmood

Assimilation is the process by which immigrants become some part of the mainstream culture of their new nation, decreasing the contrasts among migrants and native-born Americans. Research frequently recognizes social assimilation, in which ethnic and social standards from the past nation become less common and different factors, for example, socioeconomic success and educational equity, alluded to under the umbrella of structural assimilation. Assimilation, particularly social assimilation, has been a questionable discussion in American policymaking, influencing education, health policy, and other areas. Previously, many trusted that all out assimilation was important for the sound working of American culture. Today, many grasp multicultural or divided absorption speculations, which see multiculturalism and a particular ethnic way of life as strength rather than a weakness.
The United States has for quite some time been seen as a land of opportunity for immigrants. However, both past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants neglect to incorporate into US society and lower wages for existing workers. This paper reviews the literature on historical and contemporary migrant flows, yielding new experiences on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into the US economy and society, and the impact of migration on the work advertise.  

Syed Usman Jamil, Khalid Khan

The early internet user needs were coped by current internet architecture that was based on host-centric communication model. Now a day, usage as well as requirements of internet is changed however mostly internet users are interested to access large amount of data/information regardless of physical location.  This paradigm changes in the internet usage model along with mobility support, better security and pressing needs of users has invited researchers to consider radical changes in the internet architecture. By following this direction, we have reviewed many on-going efforts of researchers in which the future internet can be developed on the foundation of Information- Centric Networking. 
To sync billions of objects over the internet is promised by the internet of things (IOT). To deploy numerous individual IOT architectures, in domains of diverse nature, the ongoing trend is to deploy a common IOT platform, so that objects may be accessible and synchronized with applications across domains and organizations. To achieve this goal, limited proposals are developed to model unified host centric IOT infrastructure operate at upper layer of current host centric internet. Therefore, fundamental mismatch is evident in between the today’s host centric nature of internet and IOT system having information centric nature. We propose to develop common set of services and protocols to resolve this mismatch, which form a platform for IOT, on the basis of ICN paradigm, which may be named as ICN-IOT platform.  ICN-IOT merger is the ICN salient feature and therefore enables seamless scalability, mobility support and efficient service and content delivery. 
The main aim of these investigations is to find out the core functionalities of ICN architectures, overview of IOT functionalities and architectural requirements, and the review of ICN over IOT implementations and their advantages and challenges to sketch out the key unresolved challenges in this field of networking research.  

Michael James Wood

This paper investigates the logical and physical network design considerations for a small business.  Moreover, the paper investigates how a business facing data consistency issues may address the issue by implementing a network design solution and how networks can be monitored and protected from security threats. 
Part one of this paper investigates the networking solution and networking topologies. Part two discusses networking infrastructure such as the purchasing of necessary networking devices to centralize the businesses data communications and background and foreground services. Part three of this paper discusses various aspects of network and data communication monitoring using a networking tool provided by SolarWinds. The last section, part four investigates a security proposal for the businesses network and discusses data recovery, malware and authentication.  

Daniel Jones

This paper evaluates various aspects of design and security of the network infrastructure of an SME in the UK. It signifies how the best practices in network deployment from the literature can be used to acquire an efficient and secure communication network. The paper includes comparative analyses of a wide range of components of the network infrastructure, and different types of network diagrams. The paper also discusses various aspects of monitoring of the network infrastructure, highlights the critical parameters to gauge network performance, and demonstrates the use of different monitoring tools. The last section of this paper discusses security in the context of network infrastructure of the SME. It discusses various theoretical aspects of security, identifies various threats that could be posed to the SMEs, and a range of logical and physical countermeasures to protect against security threats and attacks. This paper can be helpful for the researchers and practitioners interested in the design and security of the network infrastructure of the SMEs. This paper can also act as a guideline for the users to apply the best practices from the literature to their own network deployment and management.

S K A Khan, M Adeel, M A Azam

In reality, mobile ad-hoc networks are highly unpredictable because any node can join or leave the network at any time, thus making reliable and effective communication a problem. This issue is addressed by introducing new breed of ad-hoc networking, known as opportunistic networks. Opportunistic networking is a concept that has evolved from mobile ad-hoc networking. In opportunistic networks nodes have no prior knowledge of routes to intended destinations. Any node in the network can be used as potential forwarder with the exception of taking information one step closer to intended destination. The forwarding decision is based on the information gathered from the source node or encountering node. The opportunistic forwarding can only be achieved if message forwarding is carried out in store and forward fashion. Although, opportunistic networks are more flexible than traditional MANETs, however, due to little insight of network, it poses distinct challenges such as intermittent connectivity, variable delays, short connection duration and dynamic topology. Addressing these challenges in opportunistic network is the basis for developing new and efficient protocols for information sharing. This paper presents a conceptual study for opportunistic networks to improve the overall message delivery at destinations while keeping the communication cost very low. Some assumptions are considered to improved directivity of message flow towards intended destinations. These assumptions exploit human social relationships analogies such as popularity and use of hybrid communication by applying opportunistic concepts on top of traditional ad-hoc routing such as AODV to gain maximum message directivity. The experiment results have shown that by combining traditional ad-hoc routing with opportunistic forwarding has not only improved directivity but as a result have achieved a great improvement in message delivery to intended destinations.

Sara Amin

Kids are almost left with no options than to carry heavy school bags to school these days for a number of reasons. It has been observed by pediatricians that such a thing automatically leads to strained backs and necks in growing children, and also impacts the learning outcomes of the students. It is not any more uncommon to find students, especially in middle schools, carrying huge bags weighing up to 30 pounds on their backs on a regular basis. Each year millions of students carry heavy bags with their shoulders drawn down with the weight. It is not surprising then that children complain of back pain, neck sprains etc.
Previously there are different studies in some developed countries regarding the impacts of Heavy Bags on Child`s health and learning outcome. In Pakistan, there is very little consideration awarded to analysis of student`s physical health and learning outcomes in context of the heavy bags they carry. Hence the role of Heavy bags presents an important area for analysis of the impacts of heavy bags in primary students in Pakistan. 
The study used a self-administered questionnaire among teachers of sampled students from public schools in Peshawar, KPK, Pakistan. The data collected was analyzed using statistical tools. The results suggested that that the respondents agreed that students in their class have heavy bags, their students complain of back pain due to heavy bags and often suffer muscle pain. Students have short attention span, often have damaged spinal cord, suffer with back pain and hence leads to absence of students from school. The results also signify that heavy bags result in low concentration, fatigue, learning and effect activities of the students.