Efficient Passive Clustering and Gateways selection MANETs

Passive clustering does not employ control packets to collect topological information in ad hoc networks. In our proposal, we avoid making frequent changes in cluster architecture due to repeated election and re-election of cluster heads and gateways. Our primary objective has been to make Passive Clustering more practical by employing optimal number of gateways and reduce the number of rebroadcast packets

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes

Bubbles, Crashes and the Financial Cycle. The Impact of Banking Regulation on Deep Recessions

van der Hoog S, Dawid H. Bubbles, Crashes and the Financial Cycle. The Impact of Banking Regulation on Deep Recessions. Macroeconomic Dynamics. 2019;23(3):1205-1246.This paper explores how different credit market- and banking regulations affect business fluctuations. Capital adequacy- and reserve requirements are analysed for their effect on the risk of severe downturns. We develop an agent-based macroeconomic model in which financial contagion is transmitted through balance sheets in an endogenous firm-bank network, that incorporates firm bankruptcy and heterogeneity among banks to capture the fact that contagion effects are bank-specific. Using concepts from the empirical literature to identify amplitude and duration of recessions and expansions we show that more stringent liquidity regulations are best to dampen output fluctuations and prevent severe downturns. Under such regulations both leverage along expansions and amplitude of recessions become smaller. More stringent capital requirements induce larger output fluctuations and lead to deeper, more fragile recessions. This indicates that the capital adequacy requirement is pro-cyclical and therefore not advisable as a measure to prevent financial contagion

Themelio: a new blockchain paradigm

Public blockchains hold great promise in building protocols that uphold security properties like transparency and consistency based on internal, incentivized cryptoeconomic mechanisms rather than preexisting trust in participants. Yet user-facing blockchain applications beyond "internal" immediate derivatives of blockchain incentive models, like cryptocurrency and decentralized finance, have not achieved widespread development or adoption. We propose that this is not primarily due to "engineering" problems in aspects such as scaling, but due to an overall lack of transferable endogenous trust—the twofold ability to uphold strong, internally-generated security guarantees and to translate them into application-level security. Yet we argue that blockchains, due to their foundation on game-theoretic incentive models rather than trusted authorities, are uniquely suited for building transferable endogenous trust, despite their current deficiencies. We then engage in a survey of existing public blockchains and the difficulties and crises that they have faced, noting that in almost every case, problems such as governance disputes and ecosystem inflexibility stem from a lack of transferable endogenous trust. Next, we introduce Themelio, a decentralized, public blockchain designed to support a new blockchain paradigm focused on transferable endogenous trust. Here, the blockchain is used as a low-level, stable, and simple root of trust, capable of sharing this trust with applications through scalable light clients. This contrasts with current blockchains, which are either applications or application execution platforms. We present evidence that this new paradigm is crucial to achieving flexible deployment of blockchain-based trust. We then describe the Themelio blockchain in detail, focusing on three areas key to its overall theme of transferable, strong endogenous trust: a traditional yet enhanced UTXO model with features that allow powerful programmability and light-client composability, a novel proof-of-stake system with unique cryptoeconomic guarantees against collusion, and Themelio's unique cryptocurrency "mel", which achieves stablecoin-like low volatility without sacrificing decentralization and security. Finally, we explore the wide variety of novel, partly off-chain applications enabled by Themelio's decoupled blockchain paradigm. This includes Astrape, a privacy-protecting off-chain micropayment network, Bitforest, a blockchain-based PKI that combines blockchain-backed security guarantees with the performance and administration benefits of traditional systems, as well as sketches of further applications

Theorizing an Online Politics: How the Internet is Reconfiguring Political Space, Subjectivity, Participation, and Conflict

This work considers how politics can be reinvigorated through the use of the internet. The argument consists of two parts, the first of which develops a theoretical understanding of politics, meant to differentiate it from the anti-political status quo, which draws on the theories of participatory and agonistic democracy. It then precedes to develop and adapt this understanding of politics to the context of the internet. This is done by breaking politics up into four terrains of contestation which can be configured to be more or less political. Politics requires, first of all, a common place to gather. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the political realm, I argue that such a political realm could flourish online, as the internet can be used to create a common space that is accessible to all. What is means to be political in this political realm, is approached by drawing on the theories of political subjectivity advanced by Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. Subjectivity is posited as an empty universal against the identifying impulse of anti-politics. I argue that the internet enhances our ability to become political subjects, as it can enable us to hide our private identities which so often are used by the state to classify us as objects incapable of taking part in politics. What the political subjects do in the political realm consists of participation in speech and action and engaging in conflict. Taking Arendt’s participatory politics as a starting point, I argue that the ability to participate in political debate and decision making is essential for political freedom. This form of freedom can flourish online where the problems of scale and size, which have traditionally been used to argue that representative government is the only viable form of democracy, are less of an issue. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, I posit the embrace of conflict and disagreement as what calls politics into existence. Ultimately I argue that the internet enhances plurality, which allows us to come into contact with a wider range of views, which enables more civil disagreements to play out

Sensor Networks and Their Applications: Investigating the Role of Sensor Web Enablement

The Engineering Doctorate (EngD) was conducted in conjunction with BT Research on state-of-the-art Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) projects. The first area of work is a literature review of WSN project applications, some of which the author worked on as a BT Researcher based at the world renowned Adastral Park Research Labs in Suffolk (2004-09). WSN applications are examined within the context of Machine-to-Machine (M2M); Information Networking (IN); Internet/Web of Things (IoT/WoT); smart home and smart devices; BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN); Cloud Computing; and future trends. In addition, this thesis provides an insight into the capabilities of similar external WSN project applications. Under BT’s Sensor Virtualization project, the second area of work focuses on building a Generic Architecture for WSNs with reusable infrastructure and ‘infostructure’ by identifying and trialling suitable components, in order to realise actual business benefits for BT. The third area of work focuses on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and their Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative. The SWE framework was investigated to ascertain its potential as a component of the Generic Architecture. BT’s SAPHE project served as a use case. BT Research’s experiences of taking this traditional (vertical) stove-piped application and creating SWE compliant services are described. The author’s findings were originally presented in a series of publications and have been incorporated into this thesis along with supplementary WSN material from BT Research projects. SWE 2.0 specifications are outlined to highlight key improvements, since work began at BT with SWE 1.0. The fourth area of work focuses on Complex Event Processing (CEP) which was evaluated to ascertain its potential for aggregating and correlating the shared project sensor data (‘infostructure’) harvested and for enabling data fusion for WSNs in diverse domains. Finally, the conclusions and suggestions for further work are provided

The Internet and professional journalism: content, practice and values in Irish online news

Journalism’s encounter with the Internet has engendered a multi-layered debate concerning the place of established news media and its practitioners in public communication. The Internet and its affordances re-animate familiar themes in discussions of journalism, not least concerning power relations, gate-keeping and objectivity claims. In many popular and some academic analyses, so-called ‘traditional’ journalism is under examination because of economic forces driving the development of digital networked media, but also because the univocal nature of older media, with its enclosed culture, is considered at odds with the potential of a reconstituted public sphere founded in the open, interactive system of emerging spaces. This study, related to a wider European research project, investigates the intermeshing of Irish journalism’s professional output, practices and normative values, as materialized online and as expressed in the opinions and attitudes of practising journalists as expert respondents, with the potentialities of the Internet. Where much of the discourse to date is framed in a narrative of progress or, similarly, posits a research timeline maturing from examination of outputs to constructivist investigation of news work processes, this study seeks to find commonalities between professional journalism, as expressed in print, and the evolving online information ecology, and to critically examine claims of advancement