February 2005 | Volume 2 | Issue 2 | e54 | e52 To quickly control infectious disease outbreaks, extensive information is required to identify the source and transmission routes, and to evaluate the effect of containment policies. Traditionally, scientists have used traveland contact-tracing methods, but the recent SARS epidemic showed that sequencebased techniques for pathogen detection can als...

We study the efficiency of mechanisms for allocating a divisible resource. Given scalar signals submitted by all users, such a mechanism decides the fraction of the resource that each user will receive and a payment that will be collected from her. Users are self-interested and aim to maximize their utility (defined as their value for the resource fraction they receive minus their payment). Sta...

To meet the ever-increasing demands of mobile traffic, femtocells are considered as one of the promising solutions. In this paper, we study a sensing-based resource allocation scenario in cognitive femtocell networks and present an efficient distributed imperfect-spectrum-sensing-based resource allocation (DIRA) algorithm while considering the channel uncertainty to maximize the total data rate...

The primary objective of the Next Generation Networks, which are based on Multiuser Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MU-OFDM) is to increase the network efficiency by maximizing the total throughput of the system and minimizing the overall transmit power for a give quality of service (QOS). MU-OFDM is one of the promising techniques for achieving high downlink capacities in future ce...

Dynamic constraint satisfaction is a useful tool for representing and solving sequential decision problems with complete knowledge in dynamic world and particularly constrained resource allocation problems. However, when resources are unreliable, this framework becomes limited due to the stochastic outcomes of the assignments chosen. On the contrary, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) handle stoc...

A resource acquisition-allocation model is developed to examine the trade-off between reproduction and somatic protection. Unlike previous studies, resource intake is not assumed to be constrained: instead, resource intake is free to vary, with increased intake being associated with an increased risk of somatic damage. This gives rise to an optimal resource intake as well as an optimal allocati...

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the most promising technology for 4G mobile communication networks. The goal of LTE is to provide high data transmission rate, scalable bandwidth, low latency, and high-mobility. LTE employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) for downlink and uplink data transmission, respectively. As to ...

The ultimate goal of future generation wireless communications is to provide ubiquitous seamless connections between mobile terminals such as mobile phones and computers so that users can enjoy high-quality services at anytime anywhere without wires. The feature to provide a wide range of delay constrained applications with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as delay and data r...

The users without sufficient computing resources habitually enjoy the Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) from the cloud providers. The IaaS provider, in turn, achieves immense financial gains when the demand by the clients reaches a summit level. In the related scenarios, the task scheduling emerges a significant daunting challenge for the provider to offer the Quality of Service (QoS). The ear...

This paper presents a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm (HMA) for Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (MRCPSP) in PERT networks. A PERT-type project, where activities require resources of various types with random duration, is considered. Each activity can be accomplished in one of several execution modes and each execution mode represents an alternative combination of resou...