Groups Excluded from ‘Representative’ Household Surveys: An Analysis Based on Remittances Sent and Received in Vietnam

The Vietnam Living Standard Surveys (VLSS) are supposed to be representative of the entire population in Vietnam. However, we uncover an anomaly that the amount of remittances received from domestic sources is significantly larger than the amount of remittances sent to domestic sources, implying that the survey is at least not representative of remittance senders. By further exploring a unique characteristic of the survey questions about remittances, we determine that, in particular, female and urban-dwelling remittance senders are underrepresented in the survey.

The morphing of fluid queues into Markov-modulated Brownian motion

Ramaswami showed recently that standard Brownian motion arises as the limit of a family of Markov-modulated linear fluid processes. We pursue this analysis with a fluid approximation for Markov-modulated Brownian motion. Furthermore, we prove that the stationary distribution of a Markov-modulated Brownian motion reflected at zero is the limit from the well-analyzed stationary distribution of approximating linear fluid processes. Key matrices in the limiting stationary distribution are shown to be solutions of a new quadratic equation, and we describe how this equation can be efficiently solved. Our results open the way to the analysis of more complex Markov-modulated processes.Comment: 20 page; the material on p7 (version 1) has been removed, and pp.8-9 replaced by Theorem 2.7 and its short proo

Two-dimensional fluid queues with temporary assistance

We consider a two-dimensional stochastic fluid model with $N$ ON-OFF inputs and temporary assistance, which is an extension of the same model with $N = 1$ in Mahabhashyam et al. (2008). The rates of change of both buffers are piecewise constant and dependent on the underlying Markovian phase of the model, and the rates of change for Buffer 2 are also dependent on the specific level of Buffer 1. This is because both buffers share a fixed output capacity, the precise proportion of which depends on Buffer 1. The generalization of the number of ON-OFF inputs necessitates modifications in the original rules of output-capacity sharing from Mahabhashyam et al. (2008) and considerably complicates both the theoretical analysis and the numerical computation of various performance measures

APMEC: An Automated Provisioning Framework for Multi-access Edge Computing

Novel use cases and verticals such as connected cars and human-robot cooperation in the areas of 5G and Tactile Internet can significantly benefit from the flexibility and reduced latency provided by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Existing frameworks managing and orchestrating MEC and NFV are either tightly coupled or completely separated. The former design is inflexible and increases the complexity of one framework. Whereas, the latter leads to inefficient use of computation resources because information are not shared. We introduce APMEC, a dedicated framework for MEC while enabling the collaboration with the management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks for NFV. The new design allows to reuse allocated network services, thus maximizing resource utilization. Measurement results have shown that APMEC can allocate up to 60% more number of network services. Being developed on top of OpenStack, APMEC is an open source project, available for collaboration and facilitating further research activities