Mobile Commerce and Applications: An Exploratory Study and Review

Mobile commerce is enabling the development of additional revenue streams for organizations through the delivery of chargeable mobile services. According to the European Information Technology Observatory, the total amount of revenue generated by mobile commerce was reported to be less than {\pounds}9 million in the United Kingdom in 2001. By 2005 this had, at least, doubled and more recent industry forecasts project significant global growth in this area. Mobile commerce creates a range of business opportunities and new revenue streams for businesses across industry sectors via the deployment of innovative services, applications and associated information content. This paper presents a review of mobile commerce business models and their importance for the creation of mobile commerce solutions.Comment: Journal of Computing online at https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing

Sprinklers: A Randomized Variable-Size Striping Approach to Reordering-Free Load-Balanced Switching

Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, calling for switches that can scale well in both size and speed. While load-balanced switches can achieve such scalability, they suffer from a fundamental packet reordering problem. Existing proposals either suffer from poor worst-case packet delays or require sophisticated matching mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new family of stable load-balanced switches called "Sprinklers" that has comparable implementation cost and performance as the baseline load-balanced switch, but yet can guarantee packet ordering. The main idea is to force all packets within the same virtual output queue (VOQ) to traverse the same "fat path" through the switch, so that packet reordering cannot occur. At the core of Sprinklers are two key innovations: a randomized way to determine the "fat path" for each VOQ, and a way to determine its "fatness" roughly in proportion to the rate of the VOQ. These innovations enable Sprinklers to achieve near-perfect load-balancing under arbitrary admissible traffic. Proving this property rigorously using novel worst-case large deviation techniques is another key contribution of this work

Relationship of rock microscopic parameters with the elastic modulus and strength

The microscopic damage of materials will induce changes in the macroscopic mechanical characteristics of rock material. When simulating engineering problems using the discrete element method, to explore the macroscopic mechanical response of rock material, the microscopic parameters that match the macro material characteristics must be obtained. In this paper, the influence of macroscopic mechanical properties of rock materials is studied through the variation of microscopic parameters, and the quantitative relation between macroscopic parameters of rock material is discussed. The results show that, (1) In accordance with the order of influencing factors, the parameters affecting the elastic modulus of the specimen are parallel bond elastic modulus, particle contact modulus, and parallel bond stiffness ratio. (2) The Poisson’s ratio of the specimen was most influenced by the parallel bond stiffness ratio, and their relation was nonlinear. The influence of parallel bond modulus and friction factor on the Poisson’s ratio was negatively correlated. (3) The effect of particle contact stiffness ratio, parallel bond stiffness ratio, and particle contact modulus on the uniaxial compressive strength was less than that of the particle friction factor