Issues Related to the Emergence of the Information Superhighway and California Societal Changes, IISTPS Report 96-4

The Norman Y. Mineta International Institute for Surface Transportation Policy Studies (IISTPS) at San José State University (SJSU) conducted this project to review the continuing development of the Internet and the Information Superhighway. Emphasis was placed on an examination of the impact on commuting and working patterns in California, and an analysis of how public transportation agencies, including Caltrans, might take advantage of the new communications technologies. The document reviews the technology underlying the current Internet “structure” and examines anticipated developments. It is important to note that much of the research for this limited-scope project was conducted during 1995, and the topic is so rapidly evolving that some information is almost automatically “dated.” The report also examines how transportation agencies are basically similar in structure and function to other business entities, and how they can continue to utilize the emerging technologies to improve internal and external communications. As part of a detailed discussion of specific transportation agency functions, it is noted that the concept of a “Roundtable Forum,” growing out of developments in Concurrent Engineering, can provide an opportunity for representatives from multiple jurisdictions to utilize the Internet for more coordinated decision-making. The report also included an extensive analysis of demographic trends in California in recent years, such as commute and recreational activities, and identifies how the emerging technologies may impact future changes

Wireless multimedia sensor network technology: a survey

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) is comprised of small embedded video motes capable of extracting the surrounding environmental information, locally processing it and then wirelessly transmitting it to parent node or sink. It is comprised of video sensor, digital signal processing unit and digital radio interface. In this paper we have surveyed existing WMSN hardware and communicationprotocol layer technologies for achieving or fulfilling the objectives of WMSN. We have also listed the various technical challenges posed by this technology while discussing the communication protocol layer technologies. Sensor networking capabilities are urgently required for some of our most important scientific and societal problems like understanding the international carbon budget, monitoring water resources, monitoring vehicle emissions and safeguarding public health. This is a daunting research challenge requiring distributed sensor systems operating in complex environments while providing assurance of reliable and accurate sensing

A First Characterization of Anycast Traffic from Passive Traces

Abstract—IP anycast routes packets to the topologically nearest server according to BGP proximity. In the last years, new players have started adopting this technology to serve web content via Anycast-enabled CDNs (A-CDN). To the best of our knowledge, in the literature, there are studies that focus on a specific A-CDN deployment, but little is known about the users and the services that A-CDNs are serving in the Internet at large. This prompted us to perform a passive characterization study, bringing out the principal A-CDN actors in our monitored setup, the services they offer, their penetration, etc. Results show a very heterogeneous picture, with A-CDN empowered services that are very popular (e.g., Twitter or Bing), serve a lot of different contents (e.g., Wordpress or adult content), and even include audio/video streaming (e.g., Soundcloud, or Vine). Our measurements show that the A-CDN technology is quite mature and popular, with more than 50% of web users that access content served by a A-CDN during peak time

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Seismic Monitoring of Buildings

This article presents a new wireless seismic sensor network system, especially design for building monitoring. The designed prototype allows remote control, and remote and real-time monitoring of the recorded signals by any internet browser. The system is formed by several Nodes (based on the CC3200 microcontroller of Texas Instruments), which are in charge of digitizing the ambient vibrations registered by three-component seismic sensors and transmitting them to a central server. This server records all the received signals, but also allows their real-time visualization in several remote client browsers thanks to the JavaScript’s Node.js technology. The data transmission uses not only Wi-Fi technology, but also the existing network resources that nowadays can be found usually in any official or residential building (lowering deployment costs). A data synchronization scheme was also implemented to correct the time differences between the Nodes, but also the long-term drifts found in the internal clock of the microcontrollers (improving the quality of records). The completed system is a low-cost, open-hardware and open-software design. The prototype was tested in a real building, recording ambient vibrations in several floors and observing the differences due to the building structure.This study was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 821046, the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad through research project CGL2016-77688-R, by the Consellería de Participación, Transparencia, Cooperación y Calidad Democrática de la Generalitat Valenciana, and by Research Group VIGROB-116 (University of Alicante)

Derailed by the D.C. Circuit: Getting Network Management Regulation Back on Track

As the Internet continues to play a more central role in the daily lives of Americans, concerns about how Internet service providers manage their networks have arisen. Responding to these concerns and recognizing the importance of maintaining the open and competitive nature of the Internet, the FCC has taken incremental steps to regulate network management practices. Perhaps the most significant of these steps was its August 2008 Memorandum Decision and Order in which the FCC condemned Comcast Corporation\u27s network management practices as discriminatory and arbitrary. In that Order, the FCC required that Comcast (1) adopt new practices that complied with federal Internet policy and (2) disclose the specifics to its customers and the FCC. Comcast responded by adopting a new practice and, in the alternative, filing an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging the FCC\u27s authority to regulate network management practices. On April 6, 2010, the D.C. Circuit issued its much-anticipated decision. In a narrow opinion, it vacated the Order, holding that the FCC had neither express nor ancillary authority to regulate network management practices. In the wake of the D.C. Circuit\u27s decision is uncertainty about the path forward. The FCC has, however, reaffirmed its commitment to promote federal Internet policy. The first step to getting Internet regulation back on track is to reestablish jurisdiction. As this Note discusses, there are a number of ways in which the FCC can accomplish this. However, jurisdiction is merely the first step. After taking a closer look at whether Comcast\u27s post-2008 Order network management practices actually complied with the FCC\u27s Order, this Note recommends that the next step is to adopt clear rules for network management, backed by monitoring procedures and real consequences designed to ensure long-term compliance

Derailed by the D.C. Circuit: Getting Network Management Regulation Back on Track

As the Internet continues to play a more central role in the daily lives of Americans, concerns about how Internet service providers manage their networks have arisen. Responding to these concerns and recognizing the importance of maintaining the open and competitive nature of the Internet, the FCC has taken incremental steps to regulate network management practices. Perhaps the most significant of these steps was its August 2008 Memorandum Decision and Order in which the FCC condemned Comcast Corporation\u27s network management practices as discriminatory and arbitrary. In that Order, the FCC required that Comcast (1) adopt new practices that complied with federal Internet policy and (2) disclose the specifics to its customers and the FCC. Comcast responded by adopting a new practice and, in the alternative, filing an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging the FCC\u27s authority to regulate network management practices. On April 6, 2010, the D.C. Circuit issued its much-anticipated decision. In a narrow opinion, it vacated the Order, holding that the FCC had neither express nor ancillary authority to regulate network management practices. In the wake of the D.C. Circuit\u27s decision is uncertainty about the path forward. The FCC has, however, reaffirmed its commitment to promote federal Internet policy. The first step to getting Internet regulation back on track is to reestablish jurisdiction. As this Note discusses, there are a number of ways in which the FCC can accomplish this. However, jurisdiction is merely the first step. After taking a closer look at whether Comcast\u27s post-2008 Order network management practices actually complied with the FCC\u27s Order, this Note recommends that the next step is to adopt clear rules for network management, backed by monitoring procedures and real consequences designed to ensure long-term compliance

Confucius Queue Management: Be Fair But Not Too Fast

When many users and unique applications share a congested edge link (e.g., a home network), everyone wants their own application to continue to perform well despite contention over network resources. Traditionally, network engineers have focused on fairness as the key objective to ensure that competing applications are equitably and led by the switch, and hence have deployed fair queueing mechanisms. However, for many network workloads today, strict fairness is directly at odds with equitable application performance. Real-time streaming applications, such as videoconferencing, suffer the most when network performance is volatile (with delay spikes or sudden and dramatic drops in throughput). Unfortunately, "fair" queueing mechanisms lead to extremely volatile network behavior in the presence of bursty and multi-flow applications such as Web traffic. When a sudden burst of new data arrives, fair queueing algorithms rapidly shift resources away from incumbent flows, leading to severe stalls in real-time applications. In this paper, we present Confucius, the first practical queue management scheme to effectively balance fairness against volatility, providing performance outcomes that benefit all applications sharing the contended link. Confucius outperforms realistic queueing schemes by protecting the real-time streaming flows from stalls in competing with more than 95% of websites. Importantly, Confucius does not assume the collaboration of end-hosts, nor does it require manual parameter tuning to achieve good performance

Technological adaptation, cities and new work

Where does adaptation to innovation take place? The author presents evidence on the role of agglomeration economies in the application of new knowledge to production. All else equal, workers are more likely to be observed in new work in locations that are initially dense in both college graduates and industry variety. This pattern is consistent with economies of density from the geographic concentration of factors and markets related to technological adaptation. A main contribution is to use a new measure, based on revisions to occupation classifications, to closely characterize cross-sectional differences across U.S. cities in adaptation to technological change. Worker-level results also provide new evidence on the skill bias of recent innovations.Cities and towns ; Urban economics ; Labor market ; Job creation ; Technological innovations