Proof-of-familiarity: A privacy-preserved blockchain scheme for collaborative medical decision-making

The current healthcare sector is facing difficulty in satisfying the growing issues, expenses, and heavy regulation of quality treatment. Surely, electronic medical records (EMRs) and protected health information (PHI) are highly sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). However, the sharing of EMRs, enhances overall treatment quality. A distributed ledger (blockchain) technology, embedded with privacy and security by architecture, provides a transparent application developing platform. Privacy, security, and lack of confidence among stakeholders are the main downsides of extensive medical collaboration. This study, therefore, utilizes the transparency, security, and efficiency of blockchain technology to establish a collaborative medical decision-making scheme. This study considers the experience, skill, and collaborative success rate of four key stakeholders (patient, cured patient, doctor, and insurance company) in the healthcare domain to propose a local reference-based consortium blockchain scheme, and an associated consensus gathering algorithm, proof-of-familiarity (PoF). Stakeholders create a transparent and tenable medical decision to increase the interoperability among collaborators through PoF. A prototype of PoF is tested with multichain 2.0, a blockchain implementing framework. Moreover, the privacy of identities, EMRs, and decisions are preserved by two-layer storage, encryption, and a timestamp storing mechanism. Finally, superiority over existing schemes is identified to improve personal data (PII) privacy and patient-centric outcomes research (PCOR)

Statistical and graphical tool for network cost analysis and support for CAPEX allocation

In the telecommunications field, there is a selection of relevant information referred as key performance indicators due to the fact that they provide the chance to visualize the network communications performance. This data’s disadvantage is that they can be confined in massive data sets in which it is complex to elucidate at a glance the performance of the different parts of a communications system. This project performs an analysis and a graphic representation of these relevant performance indicators, which allows studying the mobile and fixed networks of a telecommunications company. In specific, the implementation of this tool is displayed by using all traffic data and network costs from different operations and countries of Telefónica footprint. This implementation gives the opportunity to check that the data analysis is done in an accurate way. In order to obtain these graphic illustrations of network costs and traffic carried over all networks, both historical and predictions, diverse methodologies are applied to key performance indicators in order to acquire its calculus and estimation. Afterwards, based on the information obtained with these procedures, we can give support in order to make decisions of investment allocations in the company’s networks. Finally, this tool has been performed with R programming language as well as for the calculation of the different data as to the development of the web application to represent this data in a graphic way with the Shiny package. Telefónica’s data has been modified in order to assure its confidentiality.Este trabajo consiste en el desarrollo de una herramienta en el lenguaje R para realizar un análisis estadístico y una representación gráfica de los costes de red históricos en los que se ha incurrido, así como del tráfico cursado en estas redes, tanto en fijas como en móviles. Además, la herramienta permitirá dar soporte a la decisión de asignación de inversiones mediante la proyección de los tráficos futuros de cada red en función de diversos parámetros de entrada. Todo ello se podrá ver reflejado gráficamente mediante una aplicación web generada en R. Para el desarrollo de la herramienta, se van a utilizar datos de costes y tráficos de red de las distintas operaciones/países del grupo Telefónica.Máster Universitario en Ingeniería de Telecomunicació

Translucent Network Design From a CapEx/OpEx Perspective

International audienceTranslucent wdm network design has been widely investigated during the last 10 years. Translucent networks stand halfway between opaque and transparent networks improving the signal budget while reducing the network cost. On one hand, opaque networks provide satisfying quality from source to destination by the use of electrical reg regeneration (Re-amplifying, Re-shaping, and Re-timing) at each network node. In addition to their high cost inherent to numerous 3R regenerations, opaque networks are also constrained by the bit-rate dependence of electrical components. Transparent networks, on the other hand, do not include any electrical regeneration; therefore, the signal quality is degraded due to the accumulation of linear and non-linear effects along the signal’s route. Translucent networks include electrical regeneration at some network nodes. Among the different possible strategies for translucent network design, sparse regeneration inserts regenerators whenever needed to help establish connection requests. In this context the objective of translucent network design is to judiciously choose the regeneration sites in order to guarantee a certain quality of transmission while minimizing the network cost. In this paper, we propose to solve the translucent network design problem by introducing a heuristic for routing, wavelength assignment, and regenerator placement. This heuristic, called COR2P (Cross-Optimization for RWA and Regenerator Placement) aims not only to minimize the number of required regenerators, but also to minimize the number of regeneration sites. In this perspective, we introduce an original cost function that contributes to the optimization of CapEx/OpEx expenditures in translucent network design. In fact, the CapEx-to-OpEx ratio strongly depends on the pricing and management strategy of the carrier. In this respect, COR2P is designed in a way that its parameters can be adjusted according to carriers’ strategies. In order to discuss its different features, we compare COR2P performance with two other algorithms proposed in the literature for translucent network design