Coalition Formation Games for Distributed Cooperation Among Roadside Units in Vehicular Networks

Vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications enable vehicular networks to support a wide range of applications for enhancing the efficiency of road transportation. While existing work focused on non-cooperative techniques for V2R communications between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), this paper investigates novel cooperative strategies among the RSUs in a vehicular network. We propose a scheme whereby, through cooperation, the RSUs in a vehicular network can coordinate the classes of data being transmitted through V2R communications links to the vehicles. This scheme improves the diversity of the information circulating in the network while exploiting the underlying content-sharing vehicle-to-vehicle communication network. We model the problem as a coalition formation game with transferable utility and we propose an algorithm for forming coalitions among the RSUs. For coalition formation, each RSU can take an individual decision to join or leave a coalition, depending on its utility which accounts for the generated revenues and the costs for coalition coordination. We show that the RSUs can self-organize into a Nash-stable partition and adapt this partition to environmental changes. Simulation results show that, depending on different scenarios, coalition formation presents a performance improvement, in terms of the average payoff per RSU, ranging between 20.5% and 33.2%, relative to the non-cooperative case.Comment: accepted and to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special issue on Vehicular Communications and Network

A Civil Society Review of Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals in Commonwealth Countries National Report: Ghana

This summary presents perspectives from civil society in Ghana on progress made and challenges experienced in relation to the national efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the extent to which MDG processes have provided opportunities to enhance participatory governance and civil society relations with government. Based on their reflections Ghanaian civil society organisations (CSOs) made a number of recommendations to accelerate

Improving Care at the End of Life

Reviews RWJF's investments in improving end-of-life care, impact on the field, and lessons learned, including the need to coordinate objectives, integrate strategies, tie strategies to policy changes and incentives, and link communications and evaluation

The Campaign for Better Care: Summary Evaluation Findings

This evaluation of the Campaign for Better Care -- an Atlantic-funded effort to include the voices and perspectives of vulnerable populations in health care so that it reflected their needs -- found that although the foundation provided needed organizational support, resources are still limited in carrying out this enormous task. Researchers suggest that a compelling, evidence-based case is needed to convince decision-makers that consumer involvement adds value in developing policy. In addition, tools to increase consumer involvement at the local level need to be tailored to site-specific needs and context.The evaluation, which Atlantic commissioned from the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California- San Francisco, examined the approaches of key grantees -- Community Catalyst, National Partnership for Women and Families and PICO -- and measured their short and intermediate term outcomes and identified lessons learned. Though their specific approaches varied, these three national organizations served as important catalysts within the communities in which they worked, providing advocacy, policy and organizing experience and connecting with local organizations as partners. Despite the challenging nature of this work, incremental steps were made towards greater consumer input in community health care reform efforts.

What Public Employee Health Plans Can Do to Improve Health Care Quality: Examples From the States

Explores public and private plans' strategies to improve care quality and contain costs, specifically those of state public employee health plans. Discusses examples of innovations, including data collection, reporting, and performance incentives

Game-theoretic Resource Allocation Methods for Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks allows mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to use the licensed spectrum allocated to cellular services for direct peer-to-peer transmission. D2D communication can use either one-hop transmission (i.e., in D2D direct communication) or multi-hop cluster-based transmission (i.e., in D2D local area networks). The D2D devices can compete or cooperate with each other to reuse the radio resources in D2D networks. Therefore, resource allocation and access for D2D communication can be treated as games. The theories behind these games provide a variety of mathematical tools to effectively model and analyze the individual or group behaviors of D2D users. In addition, game models can provide distributed solutions to the resource allocation problems for D2D communication. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the applications of game-theoretic models to study the radio resource allocation issues in D2D communication. The article also outlines several key open research directions.Comment: Accepted. IEEE Wireless Comms Mag. 201

AGEnda for Action: Building a Movement for Elder Women's Advocacy

Based on community listening sessions and interviews, outlines the priority issues for elder women in California and the insights of policy makers and advocates. Offers recommendations and an action agenda for funders, policy makers, and community groups

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them