Quality of Service over Specific Link Layers: state of the art report

The Integrated Services concept is proposed as an enhancement to the current Internet architecture, to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS) than that provided by the traditional Best-Effort service. The features of the Integrated Services are explained in this report. To support Integrated Services, certain requirements are posed on the underlying link layer. These requirements are studied by the Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers (ISSLL) IETF working group. The status of this ongoing research is reported in this document. To be more specific, the solutions to provide Integrated Services over ATM, IEEE 802 LAN technologies and low-bitrate links are evaluated in detail. The ISSLL working group has not yet studied the requirements, that are posed on the underlying link layer, when this link layer is wireless. Therefore, this state of the art report is extended with an identification of the requirements that are posed on the underlying wireless link, to provide differentiated Quality of Service

An econometric analysis of tourism in Spain: implications for the sectoral study of exports and some economic policy considerations

This paper deals with the construction of econometric models to explain the external demand for Spanish tourist services. The models include as explanatory economic variables a tourist income index and two real exchange rate indices, one with respect to client countries and the other with respect to competitor countries. The results obtained : a) support the hypothesis that the decision to expend on tourism is made in two stages with different price and income elasticities in each of them; b) show that the recent drop in demand is due to a -real exchange rate effect. With the models constructed it is possible to evaluate to what extent the drop in demand is due purely to the effect of prices and to 'what extent it is determined by exchange rate movements. The latter have had an important effect, so that a policy of appreciating the peseta indeed has different sectoral effects. This different sectoral effect, as well as the importance of distinguishing between client countries and competitors, suggest that economic policy must not be based on just one index of the effective exchange rate of the peseta but on several

Establishing Croatia’s lifelong career guidance service

On July 1st 2013, Croatia became the 28th member state of the European Union. One requirement for Croatia’s accession to the EU was the establishment of comprehensive life-long career guidance (LLCG) provision. In 2011, the Croatian Employment Service, the traditional provider of career guidance services to the unemployed, embarked on a programme to establish eight public facing pilot LLCG centres funded through EU transition funding. This article uses the results of an early evaluation of the new LLCG centres undertaken at the end of the pilot stage to explore the inter-relationship between this EU imperative and the policy and practice developments required to establish LLCG in a post-conflict and post command economy emerging EU country

Learning from 20 Years of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Costa Rica

Costa Rica's Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) programme has become something of an icon in the world of conservation. Its innovative blend of economic and regulatory instruments - and its hitches and successes - provide a valuable source of inspiration for other countries that are looking for effective ways to conserve and regenerate ecosystems. Since 1997, nearly one million hectares of forest in Costa Rica have been part of the PES programme at one time or another, and forest cover has now returned to over 50 per cent of the country's land area, from a low of just 20 per cent in the 1980s. What lessons can be learnt from the 20 years since it was founded? Also published in Spanish, this paper is for local practitioners, international researchers and donors who are interested in the Costa Rican experience

Towards Autonomic Service Provisioning Systems

This paper discusses our experience in building SPIRE, an autonomic system for service provision. The architecture consists of a set of hosted Web Services subject to QoS constraints, and a certain number of servers used to run session-based traffic. Customers pay for having their jobs run, but require in turn certain quality guarantees: there are different SLAs specifying charges for running jobs and penalties for failing to meet promised performance metrics. The system is driven by an utility function, aiming at optimizing the average earned revenue per unit time. Demand and performance statistics are collected, while traffic parameters are estimated in order to make dynamic decisions concerning server allocation and admission control. Different utility functions are introduced and a number of experiments aiming at testing their performance are discussed. Results show that revenues can be dramatically improved by imposing suitable conditions for accepting incoming traffic; the proposed system performs well under different traffic settings, and it successfully adapts to changes in the operating environment.Comment: 11 pages, 9 Figures, http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?WO=201002636

Identifying options for regulating the coordination of network investments with investments in distributed electricity generation

This paper analyses two effects of the current Dutch regulation on the system operators of the electricity network and on teh decentralised generators of electricity, and suggests a number of improvements in the tariff regulation. The increase in the distributed generation of electricity, with wind turbines and solar panels, necessitates investments in the distribution network. The current tariff regulation in the Dutch electricity industry, with its ex post evaluation of the efficiency of investments and the frontier shift in the x-factor, delays these investments. In the unbundled electricity industry, the investments in the network need to be coordinated with those in the distributed generation of electricity to enable the DSOs to build enough network capacity. The current Dutch regulations do not provide for a sufficient information exchange between the generators and the system operators to coordinate the investments. This paper analyses these two effects of the Dutch regulation, and suggests improvements to the regulation of the network connection and transportation tariffs to allow for sufficient network capacity and coordination between the investments in the network and in the generation of electricity. These improvements include locally differentiated tariffs that increase with an increasing concentration of distributed generators.