Peer-to-peer collaboration in content delivery networks

A low-cost collaboration architecture for web content distribution, that aims to improve all stakeholder's interests, is presented. A peer-to-peer (P2P) contribution among the end users layer is suggested, in order to increase download rates and reduce server traffic and resource usage. In addition, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) concerns are also considered, with an ISP-aware connection strategy in the P2P protocol. Collaboration among publisher's web server resources is also proposed, in order to improve the CDN architecture performance. All the elements of this architecture have been developed and have been successfully tested in 5 different scenarios, within the PlanetLab large-scale overlay network testbed. Results show that download speed increases after implementing P2P collaboration on a content delivery scenario, with a strong reduction of data transferred via HTTP servers. The ISP-aware approach reduces inter-ISP traffic, with an increase of download speeds. This implementation is fairer as the content popularity grows because end-users extreme download rates tend to approach to the average.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Design of Human Powered Directories using Mobile Agents

ABSTRACT The Internet is a worldwide mechanism for information dissemination, a medium for collaboration and communication between individuals and their computers from local to global scope. Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via Internet. Web contains billions of visible pages and it is not easy for a user to search for a specific web page. Search Engines help users to search for specific web page out of huge collection of pages. Human powered directories depend on humans to create a repository. In this paper we present use of mobile agents in designing Human powered directories

Design and Development of an E-Learning Management System

The trend of e-learning technologies is expanding fast. Web-based learning environments are becoming very common in the higher education institutions. Nowadays e-learning management systems are very popular. Many universities throughout the world deliver educational programs via the Internet. Developments of e-learning systems are generating great impact in the field of education services to improve the teaching and learning process, and overcome geographical displace. In recent years, various kinds of Internet technologies have become available for developers to implement such e-learning system that provide an e-learning gateway on the Internet. The rapid advancements in information and communication technologies, especially the networking and multimedia, have led to the development of many advanced e-learning systems these days. A user-friendly interface and a sophisticated data model are the essential design consideration to make the e-learning system easy-to-use for the instructors and learners. The need for such architecture is critical for designing the system and standards development. The system is developed under Computer Supported Cooperative Work framework and web portal technology. The system integrates all the critical and valuable communication tools that effectively improve the collaboration in an e-learning environment

Computing in the RAIN: a reliable array of independent nodes

The RAIN project is a research collaboration between Caltech and NASA-JPL on distributed computing and data-storage systems for future spaceborne missions. The goal of the project is to identify and develop key building blocks for reliable distributed systems built with inexpensive off-the-shelf components. The RAIN platform consists of a heterogeneous cluster of computing and/or storage nodes connected via multiple interfaces to networks configured in fault-tolerant topologies. The RAIN software components run in conjunction with operating system services and standard network protocols. Through software-implemented fault tolerance, the system tolerates multiple node, link, and switch failures, with no single point of failure. The RAIN-technology has been transferred to Rainfinity, a start-up company focusing on creating clustered solutions for improving the performance and availability of Internet data centers. In this paper, we describe the following contributions: 1) fault-tolerant interconnect topologies and communication protocols providing consistent error reporting of link failures, 2) fault management techniques based on group membership, and 3) data storage schemes based on computationally efficient error-control codes. We present several proof-of-concept applications: a highly-available video server, a highly-available Web server, and a distributed checkpointing system. Also, we describe a commercial product, Rainwall, built with the RAIN technology

Real networks; Albanian Scientific Collaboration Network

We have realized that we reside in a world of networks. The Internet andWorld Wide Web (WWW) are changing our lives. Our physical existence is basedon various biological networks. The sophisticated tools of Network Theory havemade it possible to quantify human dynamics, the relationships between millions ofindividuals via the analysis of the Social Networks. "Scale-Free" is the mainproperty which differentiates a lot of networks from the others, real or simulated,meaning that the vertex degree distribution of such networks follows a power low.The Internet is one of the best known scale-free networks.We study the Albanian Scientific Collaboration Network (ASCNet), which isan undirected graph, where the vertices represent the scientists and each pairs of them are adjacent if the corresponding scientists have coauthored a paper. The data used is taken from the bulletins of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Aktet of Alb Shkenca Institute, in a span 2004-2010 and 2008-2010 respectively. We analyzethe data and demonstrate the differences in the patterns of collaboration for various research fields. We argue that the ASCNet is a Scale-Free network with a slope  =3.7. We also find the "small world effect" in our network, and the clustering property

Generating Awareness from Collaborative Working Environment using Social Data

Nowadays, Internet is a place where social networks have reached an important impact in collaboration among people over the world in different ways. This paper proposes a new paradigm of building CSCW tools for business world following these new ideas provided by the social web to collaborate and generate awareness. An implementation of these concepts is described, including the components we provide to collaborate in workspaces, (such as videoconference, chat, desktop sharing, forums or temporal events), and the way we generate awareness from these complex social data structures. We also present figures and validation results in the paper to stress that this architecture has been defined to support awareness generation via joining current and future social data from business and social networks worlds, based on the idea of using social data stored in the cloud

Speech Acts and Discourse Pattern in Information Sharing Practice in Malaysian Web-Forums

Web-forum discussions are widely used in business, health and education and in general discussion virtually. This practice of sharing information via Internet is also known as Computer Mediated Discourse (CMD). By focusing on language used in web-forums, this study explores the practice of collaborative information sharing in Malaysian web-forums discourse by using Speech Acts Theory. The study found that forum-members used different speech acts to share information in an interactive manner. However, speech acts such as to explain, to suggest and to question were used more extensively than other types of speech acts. The study also found that speech acts to denote politeness such as to apologise, to greet were used in the web-forum interaction to sustain collaboration and camaraderie in online information sharing practices. The discourse pattern reveals that web-forum members interacted at two phrases; Phase 1 to seek general information about the topic of discussion, and Phase II to have a deeper discussion where new information is added to the topic of discussion that leads to new knowledge being created. The findings of the study can benefit our understandings on how best to conduct online interaction, be it in the business, health or academic sectors.     Keywords: Web-forum, Computer-Mediated Communication, Language Forms and Functions, Information Sharin

Email for clinical communication between healthcare professionals

Email is one of the most widely used methods of communication, but its use in healthcare is still uncommon. Where email communication has been utilised in health care, its purposes have included clinical communication between healthcare professionals, but the effects of using email in this way are not well known. We updated a 2012 review of the use of email for two-way clinical communication between healthcare professionals