EUCARS: A partial equilibrium model of EUropean CAR emissions (Version 3.0).

EUCARS has been designed to analyse the cost-effectiveness of various transport policy measures to reach air quality objectives. A general description and a thorough technical presentation of this partial equilibrium model of passenger transport are given. Some simulation results are then discussed to illustrate the simulation properties.eucars, transport, emissions, modelling

Improvement of Quality of Service Parameters in Dynamic and Heterogeneous WBAN

With growth in population and diseases, there is a need for monitoring and curing of patients with low cost for various health issues. Due to life threatening conditions, loss-free and timely sending of data is an essential factor for healthcare WBAN. Health data needs to transmit through reliable connection and with minimum delay, but designing a reliable, and congestion and delay free transport protocol is a challenging area in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Generally, transport layer is responsible for congestion control and reliable packet delivery. Congestion is a critical issue in the healthcare system. It not only increases loss and delay ratio but also raise a number of retransmissions and packet drop rates, which hampers Quality of Service (QoS). Thus, to meet the QoS requirements of healthcare WBANs, a reliable and fair transport protocol is mandatory. This motivates us to design a new protocol, which provides loss, delay and congestion free transmission of heterogeneous data. In this paper, we present a Dynamic priority based Quality of Service management protocol which not only controls the congestion in the network but also provides a reliable transmission with timely delivery of the packet

Design of a Recommender System for Participatory Media Built on a Tetherless Communication Infrastructure

We address the challenge of providing low-cost, universal access of useful information to people in different parts of the globe. We achieve this by following two strategies. First, we focus on the delivery of information through computerized devices and prototype new methods for making that delivery possible in a secure, low-cost, and universal manner. Second, we focus on the use of participatory media, such as blogs, in the context of news related content, and develop methods to recommend useful information that will be of interest to users. To achieve the first goal, we have designed a low-cost wireless system for Internet access in rural areas, and a smartphone-based system for the opportunistic use of WiFi connectivity to reduce the cost of data transfer on multi-NIC mobile devices. Included is a methodology for secure communication using identity based cryptography. For the second goal of identifying useful information, we make use of sociological theories regarding social networks in mass-media to develop a model of how participatory media can offer users effective news-related information. We then use this model to design a recommender system for participatory media content that pushes useful information to people in a personalized fashion. Our algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance in terms of recommendation accuracy than other state-of-the-art recommender systems. Our work provides some fundamental insights into the design of low-cost communication systems and the provision of useful messages to users in participatory media through a multi-disciplinary approach. The result is a framework that efficiently and effectively delivers information to people in remote corners of the world

Hardware-Supported ORAM in Effect: Practical Oblivious Search and Update on Very Large Dataset

The ability to query and update over encrypted data is an essential feature to enable breach- resilient cyber-infrastructures. Statistical attacks on searchable encryption (SE) have demonstrated the importance of sealing information leaks in access patterns. In response to such attacks, the community has proposed the Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM). However, due to the logarithmic communication overhead of ORAM, the composition of ORAM and SE is known to be costly in the conventional client-server model, which poses a critical barrier toward its practical adaptations. In this paper, we propose a novel hardware-supported privacy-enhancing platform called Practical Oblivious Search and Update Platform (POSUP), which enables oblivious keyword search and update operations on large datasets with high efficiency. We harness Intel SGX to realize efficient oblivious data structures for oblivious search/update purposes. We implemented POSUP and evaluated its per- formance on a Wikipedia dataset containing ≥ 229 keyword-file pairs. Our implementation is highly efficient, taking only 1 ms to access a 3 KB block with Circuit-ORAM. Our experiments have shown that POSUP offers up to 70× less end-to-end delay with 100× reduced network bandwidth consump- tion compared with the traditional ORAM-SE composition without secure hardware. POSUP is also at least 4.5× faster for up to 99.5% of keywords that can be searched compared with state-of-the-art Intel SGX-assisted search platforms

Algorithms and Design Principles for Rural Kiosk Networks

The KioskNet project aims to provide extremely low-cost Internet access to rural kiosks in developing countries, where conventional access technologies, \eg\, DSL, CDMA and dial-up, are currently economically infeasible. In the KioskNet architecture, an Internet-based proxy gathers data from the Internet and sends it to a set of edge nodes, called ``gateways'' from which ferries, such as buses and cars, opportunistically pick up the data using short-range WiFi as they drive past, and deliver it wirelessly to kiosks in remote villages. The first part of this thesis studies the downlink scheduling problem in the context of KioskNet. We pose the following question: assuming knowledge of the bus schedules, when and to which gateway should the proxy send each data bundle so that 1) the bandwidth is shared fairly and 2) given 1), the overall delay is minimized? We show that an existing schedule-aware scheme proposed in the literature, \ie\, EDLQ~\cite{JainFP04}, while superficially appearing to perform well, has some inherent limitations which could lead to poor performance in some situations. Moreover, EDLQ does not provide means to enforce desired bandwidth allocations. To remedy these problems, we employ a token-bucket mechanism to enforce fairness and decouple fairness and delay-minimization concerns. We then describe a utility-based scheduling algorithm which repeatedly computes an optimal schedule for all eligible bundles as they come in. We formulate this optimal scheduling problem as a minimum-cost network-flow problem, for which efficient algorithms exist. Through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme performs at least as well as EDLQ in scenarios that favour EDLQ and achieves up to 40\% reduction in delay in those that do not. Simulation results also indicate that our scheme is robust against the randomness in actual timing of buses. The second part of the thesis shares some of our experience with building and testing the software for KioskNet. We subjected a prototype of the KioskNet system, built on top of the DTN reference implementation, to stress tests and were able to identify and fix several software defects which severely limited the performance. From this experience, we abstract some general principles common to software that deals with opportunistic communication