Application of advanced on-board processing concepts to future satellite communications systems: Bibliography

Abstracts are presented of a literature survey of reports concerning the application of signal processing concepts. Approximately 300 references are included

Choosing a Health Care Provider: The Role of Quality Information

Reviews research on the adequacy of the information available on provider quality; the type of information consumers seek in choosing physicians, physician groups, and hospitals; and their attitudes about, awareness of, and use of that information

An emerging paradigm or just another trajectory? Understanding the nature of technological changes using engineering heuristics in the telecommunications switching industry

The theoretical literature on technological changes distinguishes between paradigmatic changes and changes in trajectories. Recently several scholars have performed empirical studies on the way technological trajectories evolve in specific industries, often by predominantly looking at the artifacts. Much less - if any - empirical work has been done on paradigmatic changes, even though these have a much more profound impact on today's industry. It follows from the theory that such studies would need to focus more on the knowledge level than on the artifact level, raising questions on how to operationalize such phenomena. This study aims to fill this gap by applying network-based methodologies to knowledge networks, represented here by patents and patent citations. The rich technological history of telecommunications switches shows how engineers in the post-war period were confronted with huge challenges to meet drastically changing demands. This historical background is a starting point for an in-depth analysis of patents, in search of information about technological direction, technical bottlenecks, and engineering heuristics. We aim to identify when such changes took place over the seven different generations of technological advances this industry has seen. In this way we can easily recognize genuine paradigmatic changes compared to more regular changes in trajectory.technological trajectories; patents; network analysis; telecommunication manufacturing industry

The Great Divide: Ruralisation of Poverty in Russia

Using data from the RLMS for the period 2000-2004 we investigate poverty trends in Russia. We find that urban poverty declines at twice the rate of rural poverty so that by 2004 poverty in Russia had become a largely rural phenomenon for the first time since transition began. This finding does not stem from changing population characteristics or shares, is not dependent on the use of a particular poverty line nor is it driven by the rapid expansions that have occurred in Moscow, St. Petersburg or other urban areas. Our findings flesh out those of Ravallion et al (2007) who, in contrast to other regions, "find signs" of a ruralisation of poverty in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. We attribute some of the differential to the labour market

Human Resource and Employment Practices in Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998

[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms to leverage network and information technologies to reduce labor costs and create customer segmentation strategies. “Good jobs” versus “bad jobs,” or higher versus lower wage jobs, do not vary according to whether firms adopt a high- involvement model. They vary along two other dimensions: (1) within firms and occupations, by the value-added of the customer segment that an employee group serves; and (2) across firms, by union and nonunion status. We believe that this customer segmentation strategy is becoming a more general model for employment practices in large-scale service | operations; telecommunications services firms may be somewhat more | advanced than other service firms in adopting this strategy because of certain unique industry characteristics. The scale economies of network technology are such that once a company builds the network infrastructure to a customer’s specifications, the cost of additional services is essentially zero. As a result, and notwithstanding technological uncertainty, all of the industry’s major players are attempting to take advantage of system economies inherent in the nature of the product market and technology to provide customized packages of multimedia products to identified market segments. They have organized into market-driven business units providing differentiated services to large businesses and institutions, small businesses, and residential customers. They have used information technologies and process reengineering to customize specific services to different segments according to customer needs and ability to pay. Variation in work and employment practices, or labor market segmentation, follows product market segmentation. As a result, much of the variation in employment practices in this industry is within firms and within occupations according to market segment rather than across firms. In addition, despite market deregulation beginning in 1984 and opportunities for new entrants, a tightly led oligopoly structure is replacing the regulated Bell System monopoly. Former Bell System companies, the giants of the regulated period, continue to dominate market share in the post-1984 period. Older players and new entrants alike are merging and consolidating in order to have access to multimedia markets. What is striking in this industry, therefore, is the relative lack of variation in management and employment practices across firms after more than a decade of experience with deregulation. We attribute this lack of variation to three major sources. (1) Technological advances and network economics provide incentives for mergers, organizational consolidation, and, as indicated above, similar business strategies. (2) The former Bell System companies have deep institutional ties, and they continue to benchmark against and imitate each other so that ideas about restructuring have diffused quickly among them. (3) Despite overall deunionization in the industry, they continue to have high unionization rates; de facto pattern bargaining within the Bell system has remained quite strong. Therefore, similar employment practices based on inherited collective bargaining agreements continue to exist across former Bell System firms

Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper's channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61501507), and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. BK20150719). The work of Nan Yang is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150103905)

The 30/20 GHz communications system functional requirements

The characteristics of 30/20 GHz usage in satellite systems to be used in support of projected communication requirements of the 1990's are defined. A requirements analysis which develops projected market demand for satellite services by general and specialized carriers and an analysis of the impact of propagation and system constraints on 30/20 GHz operation are included. A set of technical performance characteristics for the 30/20 GHz systems which can serve the resulting market demand and the experimental program necessary to verify technical and operational aspects of the proposed systems is also discussed

Trade Induced Technical Change? The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation, IT and Productivity

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on broad measures of technical change - patenting, IT, R&D, TFP and management practices - using new panel data across twelve European countries between 1996-2007. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Chinese import competition (1) led to increased technical change within firms; and (2) reallocated employment between firms towards more technologically advanced firms. These within and between effects were about equal in magnitude, and appear to account for 15% of European technology upgrading over 2000-2007 (and even higher when allowing for offshoring to China). Rising Chinese import competition also led to falls in employment, profits, prices and the share of unskilled workers. By contrast, import competition from developed countries had no effect on innovation. We develop a simple "trapped factor" model that is consistent with these empirical findings.China, technical change, trade, firm survival, employment