An integrated framework to classify healthcare virtual communities

Healthcare (HC) strives to improve service quality through its cost-effective social computing strategy. However, sudden rise in the count of virtual community of practices (VCoPs) introduced many choices for physicians; As a result, it is not surprising to observe current literature reporting lack of study to investigate ideas integration within and between VCoPs. VCoPs need to be categorized for HC physicians so they will be able to pin-point effective a VC to attain assistance from. This paper is one of the first investigative studies, in HC sector, that proposed a framework to classify and pin-point appropriate VCoPs, for physicians, after it reviewed and analyzed traditional and up-to-date theoretical, empirical and case study literature in the area of social computing, knowledge management (KM) and VCoPs. The implementation of this framework pinpointed professional VCoPs as most appropriate for physicians based on strict requirements, i.e. closed physician communities holding many participants, which are older than 5 years with high boundary crossing. This framework is also a “one-size-fit-all” formula to build an organizational VCoP, utilizable by other business sectors

Turbo NOC: a framework for the design of Network On Chip based turbo decoder architectures

This work proposes a general framework for the design and simulation of network on chip based turbo decoder architectures. Several parameters in the design space are investigated, namely the network topology, the parallelism degree, the rate at which messages are sent by processing nodes over the network and the routing strategy. The main results of this analysis are: i) the most suited topologies to achieve high throughput with a limited complexity overhead are generalized de-Bruijn and generalized Kautz topologies; ii) depending on the throughput requirements different parallelism degrees, message injection rates and routing algorithms can be used to minimize the network area overhead.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems I (submission date 27 may 2009

Distributed sensing coverage maintenance in sensor networks

Sensing coverage is one of the key performance indicators of a large-scale sensor network. Sensing coverage holes may appear anywhere in the network field at any time due to random deployment, depletion of sensor battery power, or natural events in the deployment environment such as strong wind blowing some sensors away. Discovering the exact boundaries of coverage holes is important because it enables fast and efficient patching of coverage holes. In this thesis, we propose a framework of sensing coverage maintenance in sensor networks. In our framework, a sensor network consists of stationary and mobile sensors, where mobile sensors are used as patching hosts. We divide the coverage maintenance into two components: coverage hole discovery and coverage hole patching, and propose new solutions to both components. (1) We present two efficient distributed algorithms that periodically discover the precise boundaries of coverage holes. Our algorithms can handle the case that the transmission range of a sensor is smaller than twice the sensing range of the sensor. This case is largely ignored by previous work. (2) We present an efficient hole patching algorithm, which runs in linear time, based on the knowledge of the precise boundary of each coverage hole. We further propose new solutions for looking up available patching hosts, and movement planning. We present rigorous mathematical proofs of the correctness of the proposed hole discovery algorithms. We also show the running time and the performance bound in terms of mobile sensors needed of our hole patching algorithm through solid mathematical analysis. Our simulation results show that our distributed discovery algorithms are much more efficient than their centralized counterparts in terms of network overhead and total discovery time while still achieving the same correctness in discovering the boundaries of coverage holes. Furthermore, our patching algorithm performs well in terms of number of mobile sensors needed with a linear running time, and our hole patching scheme can achieve fast hole patching time when moving mobile sensors in a parallel manner