Evaluating and Role of Standards and Guidelines in National Forest Planning

There is longstanding conflict related to planning standards and guidelines (S & Gs) used by the U.S. Forest Service to guide and constrain National Forest System land management. The role these prescriptions have played in the past in forest management, and the role they ought to play in the future, is often disputed. However, the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and the new 2012 NFMA planning regulations require S & Gs, so they must be included in forest plans in the future. The goal of this research was to provide a common understanding of how planning S & Gs were used in the past in order to provide recommendations for how standards, specifically, might be written and applied more effectively in the future. To understand the history and conflicts associated with S & Gs, I analyzed public comment letters from NFMA planning regulations, applicable case law, and background literature. Twenty-five forest plans, strategies and amendments were examined in order to create a typology of common standards and assess their use. This typology found three primary continuums of common standards: mandatory and discretionary, scale of application, and complexity. Several sub-categories are also described, including prioritization, threshold, process-based, management method, and mitigation. Fifteen interviews were conducted with USFS personnel, interest group representatives, and legal experts in order to supplement and validate findings. Findings reveal compelling reasons why the USFS should impose binding, enforceable standards upon itself, including bolstering legal accountability, political credibility, and organizational efficiency. Recommendations for writing standards, incorporating best available science, working within an adaptive management system, supporting recovery efforts for threatened and endangered species, and making use of suitability determinations and management area designations are also provided

Eud. I HC 445 e Thom.Mag. nav. 13, 8: un verso omerico ritrovato?

The present paper suggests the hypothesis that a line of the first redaction of theHomeric Centos(Eud. I HC445), which is not found in Homeric poetry, is really a genuine line of the Odyssey, lost in the direct tradition. We have evidence for that because we find the same quotation, with a slight variant reading, in another witness of indirect tradition, the Byzantine scholar and grammarian Thomas Magister (Thom.Mag. nav.13, 8).

Wireless Mesh Networks to Support Video Surveillance: Architecture, Protocol, and Implementation Issues

Current video-surveillance systems typically consist of many video sources distributed over a wide area, transmitting live video streams to a central location for processing and monitoring. The target of this paper is to present an experience of implementation of a large-scale video-surveillance system based on a wireless mesh network infrastructure, discussing architecture, protocol, and implementation issues. More specifically, the paper proposes an architecture for a video-surveillance system, and mainly centers its focus on the routing protocol to be used in the wireless mesh network, evaluating its impact on performance at the receiver side. A wireless mesh network was chosen to support a video-surveillance application in order to reduce the overall system costs and increase scalability and performance. The paper analyzes the performance of the network in order to choose design parameters that will achieve the best trade-off between video encoding quality and the network traffic generated

orchestrating softwarized networks with a marketplace approach

Abstract In the last years, network softwarization is gaining increasing popularity since it allows to achieve dinamicity and flexibility in network management, stimulating a lot of interest by both academia and industry. Cloud computing paradigm together with the new networking paradigms of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are supporting this evolution, by providing network services as single Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or chains of them. The main problem is scalability of both infrastructure and management. In fact, in order to support the SDN/NFV paradigm, the Telco Operator should deploy huge data centers, which have to be geographically distributed to guarantee low latencies to time-constrained flows, and implement complex orchestration policies. To this purpose, this paper proposes to extend the SDN/NFV framework with a marketplace where Telco Operator customers behave as third-party sellers with their hardware and software resources providing VNF as a service (VNFaaS), so helping the Telco Operator in providing network services in an efficient and scalable way

A processor-sharing scheduling strategy for NFV nodes

The introduction of the two paradigms SDN and NFV to "softwarize" the current Internet is making management and resource allocation two key challenges in the evolution towards the Future Internet. In this context, this paper proposes Network-Aware Round Robin (NARR), a processor-sharing strategy, to reduce delays in traversing SDN/NFV nodes. The application of NARR alleviates the job of the Orchestrator by automatically working at the intranode level, dynamically assigning the processor slices to the virtual network functions (VNFs) according to the state of the queues associated with the output links of the network interface cards (NICs). An extensive simulation set is presented to show the improvements achieved with respect to two more processor-sharing strategies chosen as reference

Design of a Traffic-Aware Governor for Green Routers

Today the reduction of energy consumption in telecommunications networks is one of the main goals to be pursued by manufacturers and researchers. In this context, the paper focuses on routers that achieve energy saving by applying the frequency scaling approach. The target is to propose an analytical model to support designers in choosing the main configuration parameters of the Router Governor in order to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements while maximizing energy saving gain. More specifically, the model is used to evaluate the input traffic impacts on the choice of the active router clock frequencies and on the overall green router performance. A case study based on the open NetFPGA reference router is considered to show how the proposed model can be easily applied to a real case scenario

On the intertwining between capacity scaling and TCP congestion control

Recent works advocate the possibility of improving energy efficiency of network devices by modulating switching and transmission capacity according to traffic load. However, addressing the trade-off between energy saving and Quality of Service (QoS) under these approaches is not a trivial task, specially because most of the traffic in the Internet of today is carried by TCP, and is hence adaptive to the available resources. In this paper we present a preliminary investigation of the possible intertwining between capacity scaling approaches and TCP congestion control, and we show how this interaction can affect performance in terms of both energy saving and QoS