50,418 research outputs found
Identifying models of HIV care and treatment service delivery in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia using cluster analysis and Delphi survey.
BACKGROUND: Organization of HIV care and treatment services, including clinic staffing and services, may shape clinical and financial outcomes, yet there has been little attempt to describe different models of HIV care in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Information about the relative benefits and drawbacks of different models could inform the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and associated services in resource-limited settings (RLS), especially in light of expanded client populations with country adoption of WHO's test and treat recommendation. METHODS: We characterized task-shifting/task-sharing practices in 19 diverse ART clinics in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia and used cluster analysis to identify unique models of service provision. We ran descriptive statistics to explore how the clusters varied by environmental factors and programmatic characteristics. Finally, we employed the Delphi Method to make systematic use of expert opinions to ensure that the cluster variables were meaningful in the context of actual task-shifting of ART services in SSA. RESULTS: The cluster analysis identified three task-shifting/task-sharing models. The main differences across models were the availability of medical doctors, the scope of clinical responsibility assigned to nurses, and the use of lay health care workers. Patterns of healthcare staffing in HIV service delivery were associated with different environmental factors (e.g., health facility levels, urban vs. rural settings) and programme characteristics (e.g., community ART distribution or integrated tuberculosis treatment on-site). CONCLUSIONS: Understanding the relative advantages and disadvantages of different models of care can help national programmes adapt to increased client load, select optimal adherence strategies within decentralized models of care, and identify differentiated models of care for clients to meet the growing needs of long-term ART patients who require more complicated treatment management
Scalable RAN Virtualization in Multi-Tenant LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks (Extended version)
Cellular communications are evolving to facilitate the current and expected
increasing needs of Quality of Service (QoS), high data rates and diversity of
offered services. Towards this direction, Radio Access Network (RAN)
virtualization aims at providing solutions of mapping virtual network elements
onto radio resources of the existing physical network. This paper proposes the
Resources nEgotiation for NEtwork Virtualization (RENEV) algorithm, suitable
for application in Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) in Long Term
Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) environments, consisting of a macro evolved NodeB
(eNB) overlaid with small cells. By exploiting Radio Resource Management (RRM)
principles, RENEV achieves slicing and on demand delivery of resources.
Leveraging the multi-tenancy approach, radio resources are transferred in terms
of physical radio Resource Blocks (RBs) among multiple heterogeneous base
stations, interconnected via the X2 interface. The main target is to deal with
traffic variations in geographical dimension. All signaling design
considerations under the current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
LTE-A architecture are also investigated. Analytical studies and simulation
experiments are conducted to evaluate RENEV in terms of network's throughput as
well as its additional signaling overhead. Moreover we show that RENEV can be
applied independently on top of already proposed schemes for RAN virtualization
to improve their performance. The results indicate that significant merits are
achieved both from network's and users' perspective as well as that it is a
scalable solution for different number of small cells.Comment: 40 pages (including Appendices), Accepted for publication in the IEEE
Transactions on Vehicular Technolog
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
Internal report cluster 1: Urban freight innovations and solutions for sustainable deliveries (1/4)
Technical report about sustainable urban freight solutions, part 1 of
Recommended from our members
Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
- …