FLOCK THEORY: COOPERATION AND DECENTRALIZATION IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Research has shown that decentralized organizations and groups perform better and have more satisfied members than centralized ones. Further, decentralized self-organizing groups are particularly superior when solving complex problems. Despite mounting research in support of decentralization, the means of how to foster and maintain a decentralized, coordinated group remains a particular problem for organizations. The current line of research proposes a theory of decentralized organizational communication, flock theory, and conducts preliminary tests of the theory. Grounded in literature from social networks, flock theory represents a theoretical model for the decentralized evolution of communicative systems. The flock model is then extended to integrate roadmap based flocking, bipartite networks, and findings from small world research to create a theory of cooperation, coordination, and navigation within decentralized communication networks. Empirical illustrations of flock theory are conducted via two studies on two different research-based organizations, as research organizations focus on complex problem solving and coordination of knowledge. Findings provide initial support for flock theory, confirm parallel research on decentralization, and indicate that research-based organizations may be different from traditional corporate organizations in several ways

Hybrid laws: constitutionalizing private governance networks

s.a.: Das Recht hybrider Netzwerke. Zeitschrift für das gesamte Handelsrecht und Wirtschaftsrecht 165, 2001, 550-575.. Italienische Fassung: Diritti ibridi: la costituzionalizzazione delle reti private di governance. In: Gunther Teubner, Costituzionalismo societario. Armando, Roma 2004 (im Erscheinen)

A cross layer multi hop network architecture for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is presented. Our architecture involves the design of a simple yet efficient cooperative flooding scheme,two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms as well as the design of Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that spans and incorporates the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers for improving the performance of multihop communication. The proposed architecture exploits randomized coding at the physical layer to realize cooperative diversity. Randomized coding alleviates relay selection and actuation mechanisms,and therefore reduces the coordination among the relays. The coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, without communication among the relays and without establishing a prior route. In our architecture, routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements, such as eight times higher throughput and ten times lower end-to-end delay as well as reduced overhead, as compared to networks based on well-known IEEE 802.11 and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols