The BFOQ Defense: Title VII’s Concession to Gender Discrimination

Should the BFOQ exception still exist? Because permitting discrimination under Title VII seems fundamentally contrary to the anti-discrimination purpose of the statute, this article questions whether the BFOQ defense is consistent with the aims of Title VII or whether, in actuality, the defense undermines the Act\u27s effectiveness by providing a loophole for employers to participate in the discriminatory practices Title VII seeks to forbid

Sidelined: Title IX Retaliation Cases and Women’s Leadership in College Athletics

This paper summarizes some of the initial research findings obtained in the SERMON project, funded by Wireless@KTH. The main focus of this paper is on video streaming transmission and the quantification of how much can be gained, in terms of user satisfaction and network resource utilization, by exploiting this semantic knowledge at network level. For this purpose, different QoE-centric RRM strategies are proposed and their performances evaluated in respect to a “classical” agnostic scheme, in a scenario where users have different QoE requirements for different content types and as a function of the device screen resolution during a live video streaming transmission.QC 20140519</p

Dimensioning and Cost Evaluation of &quot;Two-Layers&quot; Ad Hoc Cellular Systems

Hybrid Ad Hoc multihop/cellular networks are considered to be interesting solutions for reducing the cost of deploying and operating future infrastructures. In particular, these networks combine the advantages deriving from extending the network coverage and increasing the available datarate. In this paper, we focus on the latter aspect, and we propose a method for characterizing the datarate improvements that are achievable in communication links involving at maximum two hops. In this study, we assume that global coverage, for medium/low datarates, can be guaranteed by a pre-existing single hop infrastructure, and we analyze the impact on performances that is achievable by simply allowing multihopping transmissions between user terminals. Then, this performance improvement is used as input for dimensioning a single hop network that has to provide the same performances. In this way, we can determine the relationship between the base station densities of both multihop and single hop systems for providing the same service level. This constitutes our initial estimate of the cost savings that could be potentially achieved by adopting these hybrid architectures. As the data rate improvement is achieved by multihopping through user terminals the performances (and the correspondent cost savings) will be function of the user density. In particular, the larger is the number of possible relays, the higher is the data rate achievable in each activation. On the other hand, having a large number of users per cell will also imply to have smaller shares, per user, of the total capacity. This represents a clear trade-off to be considered when dimensioning the network

Self-Organization, Cooperation and Control Distribution in Wide and Local Area Networks

To support the future requirements on wireless systems in an affordable manner it is commonly believed that multiple radio access technologies have to be combined. These technologies can be deployed by a single operator or, even, be managed by different competing operators. In order to cope with the increased complexity of such a multifaced wireless environment it has been argued that a transfer of Radio Resource Management (RRM) functionalities towards the network edges (access ports and, ultimately, user terminals) may be beneficial. In addition to detecting varying system conditions in a faster manner this would also allow a more responsive service adaptation. In this thesis we evaluate a set of self-organizing regimes, all with the purpose of supporting the distribution of control at the edge node. Particular emphasis is put on the design of a mechanism for dynamically establishing cooperation between different network entities whether these are access ports or user terminals. Terminal cooperation by means of multihopping is considered in the context of service provision in cellular access systems. Previously the opportunity cost associated with sharing own bandwidth, and energy loss have been seen as a major obstacle for relaying other users’ traffic. To mitigate the effects of this selfish behavior the concept of resource delegation is introduced and evaluated in combination with a rewarding scheme designed for compensating the energy losses induced by forwarding. The results show that our proposed schemes not only are capable of fostering significant cooperation among users, but also to create a simultaneous improvement in user utility, data rates as well as in operator revenues. Opening up networks of user-deployed Access Points (APs) for service provision is considered a means to radically lower the cost of future wireless services. However, since these networks are deployed in an uncoordinated manner, only discontinuous coverage will be provided. The question of how dense these networks need to be, to deliver acceptable user perception, is investigated in this thesis for a set of archetypical services. The results show that already at moderate AP densities the investigated services can be provided with sufficient quality. Epidemic exchange of popular content and inter-AP cooperation are also shown to further decrease the required infrastructure density and improve the APs’ utilization respectively. As last contribution, “Word-of-Mouth”, a distributed reputation-based scheme, is investigated in the context of access selection in multi-operator environments. By exchanging information concerning the Quality of Service (QoS) associated with the different networks, terminal agents can collectively reveal the capabilities of individual networks. For a vertical handover scenario we show that our proposed scheme can reward access providers capable of ensuring some degrees of QoS. By introducing a model for collusion, between low performing APs and terminal agents, we show that our proposed scheme is also robust to the dissemination of false information.QC 2010111

Context-based Resource Management and Architectures for Future Wide and Local Area Wireless Networks

In the last few years we have been witnessing the beginning of a revolution in the world of wireless communication. The recent launch of advanced smartphones in the mobile market has been welcomed by mobile operators as an opportunity to finally fulfill the promises of 3G and increase the uptake of mobile services. Driven by unprecedented user experience and flat rate pricing, the success of novel mobile platforms for accessing multimedia content and applications has gone far beyond the most optimistic of expectations. Data-hungry services are currently creating significant capacity limitations in many networks, and projections on future content consumption anticipate that with the next generation of mobile devices the stress on cellular infrastructures will increase. Rolling-out additional capacity is not the most profitable of solutions given the current cost structure of mobile infrastructures. Instead, a significant cost reduction can be achieved by revolutionizing the current content provision paradigm. Accordingly, this thesis proposes solutions for making future services and infrastructures more affordable. From an operator perspective, terminal-to-terminal information forwarding has the potential to increase both coverage and capacity, however it introduces opportunity costs and energy losses at the user side. Resource delegation, together with an energy reimbursement scheme, is presented in this thesis to induce user cooperation. The results show that this approach is successful in fostering significant cooperation among users and can create a simultaneous improvement in user utility, data rates and operator revenues. Opening up for public access privately deployed WLANs might radically lower the cost of wireless services. However, since these networks are deployed in an uncoordinated manner, only discontinuous coverage can be provided. To hide the sparsity of the infrastructure to the end-user perception we propose the adoption of opportunistic schemes for content pre-fetching. Results show that already with moderate AP densities a set of archetypical services, including web-browsing, can be provided with sufficient user perceived quality. Epidemic exchange of popular content, and inter-AP cooperation are also shown to further decrease the required AP density. Moreover, to support informed access selection decisions when performing vertical handovers to WLANs, we propose “Word-of-Mouth”, a reputation-based scheme for revealing the QoS of different networks. By epidemically exchanging grades on their experienced service quality, we show that terminal agents can collectively improve their decision making, avoiding selecting networks not meeting the required QoS. Context-based content delivery is presented in this thesis as means to improve the utilization of wireless resources in cellular systems. Since networks are typically dimensioned for peak hour traffic, the BSs are underutilized for significant portions of the day. By adopting context-based architectures, capable of opportunistically utilizing the instantaneous excess of resources for content pre-fetching, we show that a significant amount of additional traffic can be served in already existing networks. The gains introduced by this content provision paradigm over the current “on-demand” solutions are further expressed in terms of lower requirements on BS density, more users in the system and larger files served while reaching the same level of user experience.QC2010071

Towards a Semantic-aware Location Positioning for Smart-phones

Location-aware services and applications have be- come quite popular in the daily life of mobile users. Global Positioning System (GPS) is available in almost all new smart- phones as a mature and accurate positioning technique. GPS as a satellite-based navigation system, determines the current location of users by receiving signals from satellites. Satellite signals cannot propagate properly inside the buildings, which makes it unusable for indoor positioning. In addition, GPS consumes too much energy to be useful for many applications on mobile phones. There are many proposed alternatives for GPS but they are not as accurate. Combination of those alternatives can improve the accuracy, but varies widely depending on the user behavior and environment. This paper presents a novel architecture for semantic-aware positioning that chooses the best positioning method(s) by exploiting the semantic knowledge. QC 20131104</p