The effects of qos level degradation cost on provider selection and task allocation model in telecommunication networks

Firms acquire network capacity from multiple suppliers which offer different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. After acquisition, day-to-day operations such as video conferencing, voice over IP and data applications are allocated between these acquired capacities by considering QoS requirement of each operation. In optimal allocation scheme, it is generally assumed each operation has to be placed into resource that provides equal or higher QoS Level. Conversely, in this study it is showed that former allocation strategy may lead to suboptimal solutions depending upon penalty cost policy to charge degradation in QoS requirements. We model a cost minimization problem which includes three cost components namely capacity acquisition, opportunity and penalty due to loss in QoS

Kept in the Dark: Poor Reporting on New York City's Recovery Zone Bond Deals

In June 2009, the "Recover NYC" program was unveiled to help select projects that applied for Recovery Zone Facility Bonds (RZFB), a bond program authorized as part of the Recovery Act. While the program seemed to have good intentions, the vague requirements related to job quality, how the projects were to assist unemployed or underemployed New Yorkers, and how the projects would help the city's sustainability efforts, made it difficult to measure the program's success. Indeed, the objectives were so vague that merely allocating the bonds became a benchmark of success by economic development officials.This report details RZFB projects and is a real-life example of how projects receiving discretionary subsidies make their way through the public -- and not so public -- application process. Accountability begins with transparency, an area that is lacking in the RZFB program. We conclude that economic development officials need to make the process of allocating subsidies more accessible to New Yorkers, to encourage more public participation in future projects, and to hold these projects accountable for creating good jobs

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

POLICY FOR COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE

Agribusiness,

Allocating Resources and Creating Incentives to Improve Teaching and Learning

Offers insights from scholarly literature, related theory, and practical activities to inform the efforts of policymakers, researchers and practitioners to allocate resources and create incentives that result in powerful, equitable learning for all