A common practice among large retailers is the low-price guarantee, rebating consumers if they find an identical product cheaper elsewhere. This provides consumers with some level of comfort in their purchase decision. A similar low-price guarantee is provided by numerous service industries that allow reservation of capacity, yet do not penalize the consumer for failure to keep that reservation...

Early channel reservation schemes have increasingly become more important for providing quality of services (QoS) in the All-IP network. In order to effectively provide the necessary QoS and optimize the channel management, we present an early channel reservation scheme based on mobile movement history. The basic principle behind this design is to view the reported sequence of location data as ...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search and matching model. This paper provides an alternative perspective on the wage flexibility puzzle, explaining why the canonical model can only match the observed cyclicality of wages if the repla...

Internet is a network based on IP (Internet Protocol). Routing between its independent subnetworks (domains) is assumed by BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) which uses IP. There was no need for QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees when these two protocols were designed and these guarantees aren’t integrated in Internet. Today, the expectations changed. The introduction of new applications, like voic...

In this paper, we consider dynamic QoS Routing in an integrated-services environment where some of the offered traffic streams are dynamic. While there has been work on routing performance in the presence of purely stationary traffic, the presence of dynamic traffic has received very little attention. We consider here three routing schemes: Dynamic Random Routing (DRR), Maximum Available Capaci...

As a potential method for improving the resource utility, advance reservations is crucial for brokering computational resource in a predictable and efficient way. However, Conducting Advance Reservation efficiently in grid environment is not easy due to the insufficient support of the current grid architecture and the dynamic feature of grid resources. Based on a grid middleware Migol, this pap...

It is essential for hotel companies to evaluate and improve website performance in order to keep and increase their online presence and competitiveness in the marketplace. This article proposes an evaluation framework for hotel websites, which categorizes web information services into six information dimensions and also uses managers’ and users’ views. Based on the relative literature, the mode...

In TDMA-based MAC (media access control) protocols for satellite network access, slotted ALOHA which has been widely deployed in Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) systems. More recently, Generalized Retransmission Announcement Protocol (GRAP) was proposed in [5], which regroups the immediate access by contention at low loads and the reservation access at higher loads to achieve a better effic...

Distributed multimedia applications require negotiation of quality of service (QoS) and resource reservation for distributed application parts and communication links. Negotiation of QoS is a balancing process between the QoS specified by a client, the resource availabilities of the distributed system and the functional capabilities of the distributed application. Negotiation requires applicati...