Expansion of the Panama Canal: Effect of Transportation Cost on Bilateral Trade for USA and East Asian Partner Countries (China, Japan & South Korea)

When people heard Panama Canal, they usually think of a major historic engineering in the history of humanity which allows maritime vessels to transit through America from one ocean to another. A little know the influence of this infrastructure in the economic field, more over the Expansion Program which started to operate in June of 2016.The motivation of this study is to analyze the macroeconomic effect of the Expansion and its competitiveness. First the Panama Canal is of extreme importance to 5% of the total world trade and most of them comes from the East Asia-East USA maritime route, to evaluate the macroeconomic changes, the study is focused on this specific maritime route among 4 of the top users of the Panama Canal which are United State of America, China, Japan and South Korea. Second the Expansion is designed to lower Transportation Cost by applying economy in scale for bigger vessels, to carry more for each voyage and therefore reduce the time and fuel consumed.With all this approach, Gravity Model of International Trade was chosen to determine the variables which affect Bilateral Trades among these countries, the variables considered are Economic Size represented as GDP, Market Size represented as Population, Exchange Rate in United States Dollar and lastly the Distance represented as Transportation Cost. The result will not only help these countries to make strategic planning for trading but also help the Panama Canal to promote International Trade.It is important to mention that in the original Gravity Model proposed by Tinbergen in 1962 use Distance as a factor to measure bilateral trade, because the Expansion is to lower Transportation Cost, in this study we are going to calculate Transportation Cost comparing it with alternative routes such as the top competitor Suez Canal, Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope. The result will help us to get a better insight of the Gravity Model by replacing Distance for Transportation Cost for a more accurate result; also show how competitive is the Expanded Panama Canal in the maritime market for the East Asia-East USA route. By analyzing the changes between sailing time, voyage cost, route alternatives and the possible macroeconomics effects of the expansion by comparing different scenarios focusing on opportunity cost through a pricing model. The model is designed to estimate the possible outcome of each voyage taking into consideration some of the main variables like distance, fuel, Canal dues to evaluate the estimated time comparing it to different scenarios.The result for Bilateral Trade for USA and Partner Countries shows that variables like Economic Size have a positive impact on trade which is as expected for the development of the economy, Transportation Cost is negative because the increase in transportation cost would discourage the trading among countries while the other variables show no level of significance for Trading between these countries. Transportation Cost also show an increase in effectiveness of double the amount compared to the Original Canal, also compared to other alternative routes it only have a slight advantage in term of lower cost comparison, therefore it clearly show the importance for this project to be taken in order to maintain its competitiveness in the East Asia- East USA maritime market. Keywords: Expanded Panama Canal, Gravity Model, Transportation Cost

A formally verified access control mechanism for information centric networks

Communications in Information-Centric Networking place more attention on WHAT data are being exchanged rather than WHO are exchanging them. A well-established approach of information centric networks is the Network of Information (NetInf) architecture, developed as part of the EU FP7 project SAIL. The security of NetInf has been fairly analysed in the literature. In particular, research efforts have been focusing on achieving data integrity and confidentially, source or publisher authenticity and authorization. This paper analyses some work in the literature to enforce authorized access to data in NetInf, highlights a potential security threat and proposes an enhancement to address the discovered threat. The new enhancement has been formally verified using formal method approach based on the Casper/FDR tool

An integrated authentication and authorization approach for the network of information architecture

Several projects propose an information centric approach to the network of the future. Such an approach makes efficient content distribution possible by making information retrieval host-independent and integration into the network storage for caching information. Requests for particular content can, thus, be satisfied by any host or server holding a copy. One well-established approach of information centric networks is the Network of Information (NetInf) architecture, developed as part of the EU FP7 project SAIL. The approach is based on the Publish/Subscribe model, where hosts can join a network, publish data, and subscribe to publications. The NetInf introduces two main stages namely, the Publication and Data Retrieval through which hosts publish and retrieve data. Also, a distributed Name Resolution System (NRS) has been introduced to map the data to its publishers. The NRS is vulnerable to masquerading and content poisoning attacks through invalid data registration. Therefore, the paper proposes a Registration stage to take place before the publication and data retrieval stage. This new stage will identify and authenticate hosts before being able to access the NetInf system. Furthermore, the Registration stage uses (cap)abilities-based access policy to mitigate the issue of unauthorized access to data objects. The proposed solutions have been formally verified using formal methods approac

Challenges and solutions for secure information centric networks: a case study of the NetInf architecture

A large number of emerging Internet applications require information dissemination across different organizational boundaries, heterogeneous platforms, and a large, dynamic population of publishers and subscribers. A new information-centric network architecture called Network of Information (NetInf) has been developed in the context of the FP7 EU-funded 4WARD project. This architecture can significantly improve large scale information distribution. Furthermore, it supports future mobile networks in situations with intermittent and heterogeneous connectivity and connects the digital with the physical world to enable better user experience. However, NetInf is still in an early stage of implementation and its security is yet to be evaluated. The security concern of NetInf is a major factor for its wide-scale adoption. Therefore, this paper uses the X.805 security standard to analyse the security of the NetInf architecture. The analysis highlights the main source of threats and potential security services to tackle them. The paper also defines a threat model in the form of possible attacks against the NetInf architecture

Power allocation for coordinated multi-cell systems with imperfect channel and battery-capacity-limited receivers

This letter studies the transmit power allocation in downlink coordinated multi-cell systems with the batterycapacity-limited receivers, where the battery level of receivers is considered. The power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference noise ratio of users under the per-base station power constraints and the feasible maximum received data rate constraints determined by the receiver battery level. The optimal solutions are derived by the proposed monotonic optimization technique based algorithm. The proposed algorithm can extend the battery lifetime of the receivers with lower battery level. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm

Performance evaluation of LTE network via using fixed/mobile femtocells

This paper examines the concept of Mobile Femtocells to be the revolution of the next generation cellular networks. Mobile Femtocells can be deployed in public transportation vehicles such as trains, buses or private cars that form its own cell inside vehicles to serve vehicular and mobile User Equipments. The purpose of this study is to help cell-edge users to have better signal strength. Therefore, an investigation into Long Term Evolution cell-edge users' performance is being conducted by investigating the deployment of Mobile Femtocells in LTE system. The throughput for cell edge users can be improved by deploying Fixed/Mobile Femtocells. In this paper, two scenarios have been considered in the case of Fixed/Mobile Femtocells. The handover of Mobile Femtocell has been expressed in three more scenarios. The achieved results via Matlab simulation showed that Mobile Femtocells' users have enjoyed better Quality of Services than Fixed Femtocells' users. The improved performance has been noticed through the improvement of the Mobile Femtocells UEs' spectral efficiency, throughput and SINR over the Fixed Femtocells' users. The system behavior has been investigated under low, medium and high load traffic before and after adding the Mobile Femtocells. The results showed that adding the Mobile Femtocells in the high loaded traffic areas has the biggest affect on improving the UE's throughput

Power allocation for coordinated multi-cell systems with imperfect channel and battery-capacity-limited receivers

This letter studies the transmit power allocation in downlink coordinated multi-cell systems with the batterycapacity-limited receivers, where the battery level of receivers is considered. The power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference noise ratio of users under the per-base station power constraints and the feasible maximum received data rate constraints determined by the receiver battery level. The optimal solutions are derived by the proposed monotonic optimization technique based algorithm. The proposed algorithm can extend the battery lifetime of the receivers with lower battery level. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm