The integration of wireless LANs (WLANs) and 3G systems performed at core network level requires very little modifications to the current 3GPP architecture and provides a large set of benefits: seamless service integration, exploration of user mobility by applications, seamless use of different radio access network (RANs), easy availability of current services such as Short Message Service (SMS...

The study of component and process reliability is the basis of many efficiency evaluations in Operations Management discipline. For example, in the calculation of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) introduced by Nakajima [1], it is necessary to estimate a crucial parameter called availability. This is strictly related to reliability. Still as an example, consider how, in the study of ser...

Background Despite the importance of health facility capacity to provide comprehensive care, the most widely used indicators for global monitoring of maternal and child health remain contact measures which assess women's use of services only and not the capacity of health facilities to provide those services; there is a gap in monitoring health facilities' capacity to provide newborn care servi...

INTRODUCTION A recent exploration of factors affecting rural physiotherapy service provision revealed considerable variation in services available between communities of the study. Multiple factors combined to influence local service provision, including macro level policy and funding decisions, service priorities and fiscal constraints of regional health services and capacity and capabilities ...

As the Internet continues to experience a tremendous expansion in number of users and services today, the importance of satisfying service availability becomes recently one of the most critical factors for the success of “Internet services” such as the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer file sharing and digital audio/video streaming. In this thesis, we take an availability-centric view on end-to-end ...

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is emerging as a paradigm for developing distributed applications. A critical issue of utilizing SOC is to have a scalable, reliable, and robust service discovery mechanism. However, traditional service discovery methods using centralized registries can easily suffer from problems such as performance bottleneck and vulnerability to failures in large scalable ser...

Service replication becomes the area of interest for many providers as it can be utilized to improve both performance and availability of their own services. With the increasing number of consumers, the providers are obligated to maintain the service responsiveness (i.e. Performance and availability) with respect to the signed Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the provider and consumers. In...

This paper describes how MEADEP [SoHaR00], a system level dependability prediction tool, and SMERFS [Farr93], a software reliability growth prediction tool can be used together to predict system reliability, and availability growth) for complex systems. The Littlewood/Verrall model is used to predict reliability growth from software test data. This prediction is integrated into a system level M...