FlexiTop: A flexible and scalable network monitoring system for Over-The-Top services

Nowadays, the demand of Over-The-Top (OTT) services such as multimedia streaming, web services or social networking is rapidly increasing. Consequently, there is a wide interest in studying the quality of these services so that Internet Service Providers (ISP) can deliver the best experience to their clients. For this purpose, we present FlexiTop, a flexible and scalable system to actively monitor these OTT services, which allows an operator to obtain metrics with a limited resource usage. Due to the continuous evolution of OTT services, this system was designed with different approaches that can be extrapolated to future situations. By looking at the results, the proposal meets all the expectations and requirements and therefore it proves its success. The proposed design was implemented and validated with different alternatives whenever it was possible, both in wired and wireless networks. Moreover, long-time testing was performed to both ensure its stability and analyze the obtained dataThis work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund under the project TRÁFICA (MINECO/FEDER TEC2015-69417-C2-1-R

Debatable Premises in Telecom Policy, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 453 (2015)

The five premises that this paper considers are: 1. Everyone needs low-cost access to high speed broadband service 2. High-speed broadband is necessary for education, health, government, and other social services 3. Wireless can‟t compete with cable 4. An open Internet is necessary for innovation and necessarily benefits consumers 5. Telecommunications are better somewhere else

What Makes Complex Systems Complex?

This paper explores some of the factors that make complex systems complex. We first examine the history of complex systems. It was Aristotle’s insight that how elements are joined together helps determine the properties of the resulting whole. We find (a) that scientific reductionism does not provide a sufficient explanation; (b) that to understand complex systems, one must identify and trace energy flows; and (c) that disproportionate causality, including global tipping points, are all around us. Disproportionate causality results from the wide availability of energy stores. We discuss three categories of emergent phenomena—static, dynamic, and adaptive—and recommend retiring the term emergent, except perhaps as a synonym for creative. Finally, we find that virtually all communication is stigmergic