Time and Location Aware Mobile Data Pricing

Mobile users' correlated mobility and data consumption patterns often lead to severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper presents an optimal design of time and location aware mobile data pricing, which incentivizes users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision process, where the operator determines the time and location aware prices by minimizing his total cost in Stage I, and each mobile user schedules his mobile traffic by maximizing his payoff (i.e., utility minus payment) in Stage II. We formulate the two-stage decision problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and propose a derivative-free algorithm to solve the problem for any increasing concave user utility functions. We further develop low complexity algorithms for the commonly used logarithmic and linear utility functions. The optimal pricing scheme ensures a win-win situation for the operator and users. Simulations show that the operator can reduce the cost by up to 97.52% in the logarithmic utility case and 98.70% in the linear utility case, and users can increase their payoff by up to 79.69% and 106.10% for the two types of utilities, respectively, comparing with a time and location independent pricing benchmark. Our study suggests that the operator should provide price discounts at less crowded time slots and locations, and the discounts need to be significant when the operator's cost of provisioning excessive traffic is high or users' willingness to delay traffic is low.Comment: This manuscript serves as the online technical report of the article accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin

Design and Evaluation of Flow Mapping Systems for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Mobile wireless networks are always challenged by growing application demand. The increasing heterogeneity of both mobile device connection capability and wireless network coverage forms a general heterogeneous wireless network (HetNet). This type of HetNet contains sub-networks of different Radio Access Technologies. How to better coordinate the mappings of flows between Access Points (AP) and User Equipment (UE) inside this type of HetNet to improve system and user-level performance is an interesting research problem. The flow mapping systems used by off-the-shelf mobile devices make policy-based decisions from local information. Several global information based flow mapping systems that use Generalized Proportional Fairness (GPF) as the optimization objectives have been proposed to improve the system-level performance. However, they have not been compared with both the local-policy based approaches and the optimal solution under the same assumptions with variations of system parameters. Therefore, it is still unclear to the community whether it is worthwhile to construct a flow mapping system for HetNets composed by LTE and WiFi networks, even under a simplified assumption of only optimizing throughput related system performance metrics. In this dissertation, we evaluate three types of flow mapping systems: Global Information based Flow Mapping Systems (GIFMS), Local Information based Flow Mapping Systems (LIFMS), and Semi-GIFMS. We evaluate these systems with metrics related to both the spectrum efficiency and flow-level fairness under the following variations of system parameters: 1) topologies of UEs; 2) coverage of APs; 3) number of UEs; 4) number of non-participating UEs; 5) on-off session dynamics; 6) UE mobility. We also discuss options to implement each type of flow mapping systems and any relevant trade-offs. From the evaluations, we find that the currently-in-use WiFi preferred local greedy flow mapping system provides far poorer spectral efficiency and generalized proportional fairness than all the other tested flow mapping systems, including the local greedy flow mapping systems that give LTE and WiFi equal opportunities (local-greedy-equal-chance) in most settings. This finding indicates that the flow mapping system in use has much room for improvement in terms of GPF and aggregate throughput. The performance of local-greedy-equal-chance is close to that of the global and AP-level information based systems under some UE topologies. However, their performance is not as consistent as the global and AP-level based systems when UEs form clusters that produce AP load imbalance. We also derive the incremental evaluations of GPF for both proportional and max-min fair scheduled APs. Based on these derivations, we propose a design for AP-level information based flow mapping system or Semi-GIFMS. It is an event-triggered flow mapping system based on minimum AP-level metrics monitoring and dissemination. From our evaluation and analysis, this flow mapping system performs equivalent to or better than GIFMS in terms of both GPF and aggregate throughput in all the tested scenarios. It also owns the advantages of lower overhead and not requiring an additional scheduling server. We think it is the best choice for the next generation HetNets where APs can be modified to monitor and broadcast the minimum information identified. Furthermore, we find that the number of UEs, number of non-participating UEs, coverage of APs, bandwidth sharing types of APs, on-off session and UE mobility dynamics do not have a major impact on the relative performance difference among various flow mapping systems

The Role of Entrepreneurial Passion and Creativity in Entrepreneurial Intention: A Hierarchical Analysis of the Moderating Effect of Entrepreneurial Support Programs

Based on the MOA (Motivation - Opportunity - Ability) model framework, a hierarchical model is built and the application of the self-efficacy theory is discussed in relation entrepreneurial passion, creativity and entrepreneurial intention in Chinese university graduate students. The results of questionnaire surveys from 1057 students and 238 members of the faculty show that entrepreneurial passion and creativity positively influence entrepreneurial intention, and that entrepreneurial self-efficacy partly mediates the above relationship. The questionnaire results also reveal that entrepreneurial support programs positively moderate the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial self-efficacy but negatively moderate the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Based on empirical research, this paper provides a way forward to improving entrepreneurial intention for graduate students. Keywords: Entrepreneurial intention, Entrepreneurial passion, Creativity, Entrepreneurial support programs, Entrepreneurial self-efficac

Learning the Course of Design and Analyze of Computer Algorithms via Online Coding

The course of design and analysis of computer algorithms is one of the core-course of computer science education; this paper presents an online coding framework to help students to learn the course of design and ananlysis of computer algorithms and other coding-related courses in computer science. With the online coding framework, a student can edit code in any web browser, and then executes it. This online coding framework can connect teachers, curriculum authors, and students in a unique social experience by tracking and streaming progress updates in real time. In particular, with the newly proposed framework, it is not difficult to find interesting and unexpected input values during students’practicing, and then help them to understand what their code is actually doing.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijere.v2i3.257

A portable device for studying the effects of fluid flow on degradation properties of biomaterials inside cell incubators.

A portable device was designed and constructed for studying the properties of biomaterials in physiologically relevant fluids under controllable flow conditions that closely simulate fluid flow inside the body. The device can fit entirely inside a cell incubator; and, thus, it can be used directly under standard cell culture conditions. An impedance-driven pump was built in the sterile flow loop to control the flow rates of fluids, which made the device small and portable for easy deployment in the incubator. To demonstrate the device functions, magnesium (Mg) as a representative biodegradable material was tested in the flow device for immersion degradation under flow versus static conditions, while the flow module was placed inside a standard cell incubator. The flow rate was controlled at 0.17 ± 0.06 ml/s for this study; and, the flow rate is adjustable through the controller module outside of incubators for simulating the flow rates in the ranges of blood flow in human artery (0.05 ∼0.43 ml/s) and vein (0.02 ∼0.08 ml/s). Degradation of Mg under flow versus static conditions was characterized by measuring the changes of sample mass and thickness, and Mg2+ ion concentrations in the immersion media. Surface chemistry and morphology of Mg after immersion under flow versus static conditions were compared. The portable impedance-driven flow device is easy to fit inside an incubator and much smaller than a peristaltic pump, providing a valuable solution for studying biomaterials and implants (e.g. vascular or ureteral stents) in body fluids under flow versus static conditions with or without cells