A new applicable model of Iran rural e-commerce development

AbstractThe significant impact of e-commerce (EC) on the livelihood or rural populations in developing countries like Iran has made this topic of popular interest to many researchers in the past decade.To take advantage of e-commerce, employing suitable models which are adaptive to the circumstances of villages in rural areas is indispensable. Iran is on track for achieving this goal, development of EC in Rural areas.Considering the importance of sharing rural ICT experiences, the trend and experiences of the Rural EC infrastructure in Iran are demonstrated in this paper. According to our research, Iran’s rural ICT network development started in 2000 with the far northern village of Shahkooh which is known as the first multi-media center of Iran. In 2004, Iran national strategic plan of Rural ICT built two well-equipped telecentres near the villages of East Livan and Gharnabad. Taking availability of data and the duration of operation al time to account, these two telecenters were selected for this paper. In 2005, UNESCO Tehran Cluster Office was empowered to carry out a study on the economic and social effect of rural ICTs to share with others, acting in this field at regional and social levels. In fact, in order to find applicable and durable solutions for economic, social and environmental problems, these projects were carried out in the rural areas of Iran.In this paper, a practical model of e-commerce for rural areas of Iran is proposed. Our research is based on quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The qualitative methods comprised of open-ended interviews with officials and telecentre operators. The proposed model is related to the national project known as “10000 Rural ICT Center” which was started in the year 2004. In this project, Rural EC services are part of the IT application services at the Rural ICT Centers which supply four services; Communication Services, IT services, Postal Services and E-Banking services

Task allocation to actors in wireless sensor actor networks: an energy and time aware technique

AbstractTask allocation is a critical issue in proper engineering of cooperative applications in embedded systems with latency and energy constraints, as in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs). Existing task allocation algorithms are mostly concerned with energy savings and ignore time constraints and thus increase the makespan of tasks in the network as well as the probability of malfunctioning of the network. In this paper we take both energy awareness and reduction of actor tasks’ times to completion in WSANs into account and propose a two-phase task allocation technique based on Queuing theory. In the first phase, tasks are equally assigned to actors just to measure the capability of each actor to perform the assigned tasks. Tasks are then allocated to actors according to their measured capabilities in such a way to reduce the total completion times of all tasks in the network. The results of simulations on typical scenarios shows 45% improvement in the makespan of tasks in a network compared to the wellknown opportunistic load balancing (OLB) task allocation algorithm that is generally used in distributed systems. It is shown that our algorithms provide better tradeoffs between load balancing and completion times of all tasks in a WSAN compared to OLB