Energy Poverty and Household Access to Energy Services in International, Regional and National Law

Household access to essential energy services such as warmth, cooling, lighting, clean cooking or power for communication and appliances is increasingly considered to be vital to human development. People’s decent living standards, health, well-being and social inclusion depend on affordable, reliable and high-quality access to energy, but instead, energy poverty is considered a growing concern globally. This contribution assesses how international law, European Union law and national law has so far responded to questions of universal household energy access and energy poverty. It focuses particularly on how states may regulate in favour of universal access to affordable, continuous and high-quality electricity supply, and pays additional attention to the role of private service providers and trends to recognise energy access as a human rights concern. In terms of the latter, the paper provides evidence that electricity access is increasingly couched in legal 'fundamental rights' or 'human rights'-terms, at UN-level, EU-level and in various national jurisdictions, such as Colombia, South-Africa or the Philippines.<br/

Adding Policy-based Control to Mobile Hosts Switching between Streaming Proxies

We add a simple policy-based control component to mobile hosts that enables them to control the continuous reception of live multimedia content (e.g. a TV broadcast) while they switch between different distributors of that content. Policy-based control provides a flexible means to automate the switching behavior of mobile hosts. The policies react to changes in the mobile host's environment (e.g. when a hotspot network appears) and determine when and how to invoke an earlier developed application-level protocol to discover the capabilities (e.g. supported encodings) of the content distributors and to execute the switches. The design of the control component is based on the IETF policy model, but extended and applied at the application-level instead of at the network-level. We implemented the system and deployed it in a small-scale test bed