ISP-friendly Peer-assisted On-demand Streaming of Long Duration Content in BBC iPlayer

In search of scalable solutions, CDNs are exploring P2P support. However, the benefits of peer assistance can be limited by various obstacle factors such as ISP friendliness - requiring peers to be within the same ISP, bitrate stratification - the need to match peers with others needing similar bitrate, and partial participation - some peers choosing not to redistribute content. This work relates potential gains from peer assistance to the average number of users in a swarm, its capacity, and empirically studies the effects of these obstacle factors at scale, using a month-long trace of over 2 million users in London accessing BBC shows online. Results indicate that even when P2P swarms are localised within ISPs, up to 88% of traffic can be saved. Surprisingly, bitrate stratification results in 2 large sub-swarms and does not significantly affect savings. However, partial participation, and the need for a minimum swarm size do affect gains. We investigate improvements to gain from increasing content availability through two well-studied techniques: content bundling - combining multiple items to increase availability, and historical caching of previously watched items. Bundling proves ineffective as increased server traffic from larger bundles outweighs benefits of availability, but simple caching can considerably boost traffic gains from peer assistance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 201

PRODUCT STRATEGIES AND STARTUPS’ SURVIVAL IN TURBULENT INDUSTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM THE SECURITY SOFTWARE INDUSTRY

This paper seeks to explore the drivers of startups’ survival in turbulent industries, characterized by high rates of entry and exit, fragmented market shares, and a rapid pace of product innovation. Specifically, the paper aims to underscore the role played by post-entry product strategies, along with their interaction, beyond that of pre-entry conditions. Based on a sample of 270 startups that entered the Security Software Industry from 1989 till 1998, we find evidence that surviving entities are those that more aggressively adopt versioning and product portfolio strategies. Interesting enough, strategic learning seems to play a major role: Focusing on one of the two product strategies commands a higher survival probability than adopting a mixed strategy.

Ionization state, excited populations and emission of impurities in dynamic finite density plasmas: I. The generalized collisional-radiative model for light elements

The paper presents an integrated view of the population structure and its role in establishing the ionization state of light elements in dynamic, finite density, laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. There are four main issues, the generalized collisional-radiative picture for metastables in dynamic plasmas with Maxwellian free electrons and its particularizing to light elements, the methods of bundling and projection for manipulating the population equations, the systematic production/use of state selective fundamental collision data in the metastable resolved picture to all levels for collisonal-radiative modelling and the delivery of appropriate derived coefficients for experiment analysis. The ions of carbon, oxygen and neon are used in illustration. The practical implementation of the methods described here is part of the ADAS Project

The Role of the Mangement Sciences in Research on Personalization

We present a review of research studies that deal with personalization. We synthesize current knowledge about these areas, and identify issues that we envision will be of interest to researchers working in the management sciences. We take an interdisciplinary approach that spans the areas of economics, marketing, information technology, and operations. We present an overarching framework for personalization that allows us to identify key players in the personalization process, as well as, the key stages of personalization. The framework enables us to examine the strategic role of personalization in the interactions between a firm and other key players in the firm's value system. We review extant literature in the strategic behavior of firms, and discuss opportunities for analytical and empirical research in this regard. Next, we examine how a firm can learn a customer's preferences, which is one of the key components of the personalization process. We use a utility-based approach to formalize such preference functions, and to understand how these preference functions could be learnt based on a customer's interactions with a firm. We identify well-established techniques in management sciences that can be gainfully employed in future research on personalization.CRM, Persoanlization, Marketing, e-commerce,

Developing new business strategies in a changing TV-industry

Problem Definition The TV landscape is changing, with technological progress the industry is moving to become a more personalised experience, where the consumer can choose what to watch and when. The entrance of on-demand video services and piracy are rewriting the way people consume their favourite series and movies, which opens up a new market with new opportunities. This new market is one where the traditional distributors might not have the natural advantages one might assume, and new players can enter the TV market. This new on-demand landscape enables the content owners to directly deliver their content to the end-consumer. However these content owners might not have the technical expertise to do so and a technical partner will be needed, like ATC, the company used for the case study for the thesis. One of the major problems in the video content market is that one content owner might not fill the full need of one consumer, who would prefer to gain access to the video content of multiple content owners. Purpose The purpose of the thesis is to describe and analyse the TV media industry and to identify new business concepts for a technical provider of OTT-video service. 2 Methodology The thesis has a descriptive goal as well as a goal to identify new business ideas. Therefore the data collected is of a qualitative nature. The primary data comes from interviews with stakeholders as well as a questionnaire conducted by potential customers. A lot of secondary data has been collected through industry reports and news papers. Conclusion Today the TV-industry, especially the online one, operate on an “allagainst- all” system, which is holding back the full potential of OTT-video. The industry will in the future be more heavily impacted by the customer, who will gain a stronger role in the value chain. To gain a stronger position for a technical provider and to ensure long term growth it is preferable to bundle different content owners. This will reduce churn rate and increase the revenue per user. Create equal partnerships between content owners, convince them that holding hands with competitors will help them beat their true competitors who are the substitutes like, piracy. The technical provider should create a neutral platform where content owners can add content, easily and quickly after release. In this platform the content owners should be given the possibility to tag their content with their brand

Data Transmission Scheduling For Distributed Simulation Using Packet A

Communication bandwidth and latency reduction techniques are developed for Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocols. Using logs from vignettes simulated by the OneSAF Testbed Baseline (OTB), a discrete event simulator based on the OMNeT++ modeling environment is developed to analyze the Protocol Data Unit (PDU) traffic over a wireless flying Local Area Network (LAN). Alternative PDU bundling and compression techniques are studied under various metrics including slack time, travel time, queue length, and collision rate. Based on these results, Packet Alloying, a technique for the optimized bundling of packets, is proposed and evaluated. Packet Alloying becomes more active when it is needed most: during negative spikes of transmission slack time. It produces aggregations that preserve the internal PDU format, allowing the resulting packets to be subjectable to further bundling and/or compression by conventional techniques. To optimize the selection of bundle delimitation, three online predictive strategies were developed: Neural-Network based, Always-Wait, and Always-Send. These were compared with three offline strategies defined as Type, Type-Length and Type-Length-Size. Applying Always-Wait to the studied vignette using the wireless links set to 64 Kbps, a reduction in the magnitude of negative slack time from -75 to -9 seconds for the worst spike was achieved, which represents a reduction of 88 %. Similarly, at 64 Kbps, Always-Wait reduced the average satellite queue length from 2,963 to 327 messages for a 89% reduction. From the analysis of negative slack-time spikes it was determined which PDU types are of highest priority. The router and satellite queues in the case study were modified accordingly using a priority-based transmission scheduler. The analysis of total travel times based of PDU types numerically shows the benefit obtained. The contributions of this dissertation include the formalization of a selective PDU bundling scheme, the proposal and study of different predictive algorithms for the next PDU, and priority-based optimization using Head-of-Line (HoL) service. These results demonstrate the validity of packet optimizations for distributed simulation environments and other possible applications such as TCP/IP transmissions