The last five years has seen an incredibly rapid growth in the number of subscribers to the Internet and in the number of organisations which now consider a presence on the world wide web as vital to their commercial interests. With such growth arises the possibilities of not just advertising services on the WWW, but actually offering, delivering and gaining payment for information services ove...

Overlay networks are viewed as one of the solutions addressing the inefficiency and slow evolution of the Internet and have been the subject of significant research. Most existing overlays providing resilience and/or Quality of Service (QoS) need cooperation among different network providers, but an inter-trust issue arises and cannot be easily solved. In this thesis, we mainly focus on network...

User-generated data is crucial to predictive modeling in many applications. With a web/mobile/wearable interface, an online service provider (SP) can continuously record user-generated data and depend on various predictive models learned from the data to improve their services and revenue. SPs owning the large collection of user-generated data has raised privacy concerns. We present a privacy-p...

The emergence of Application Service Providers hosting Internet-based data mining services is being seen as a viable alternative for organisations that value their knowledge resources but are constrained by the high cost of data mining software. In this paper, we present a new multiple service provider model of operation for the Internet delivery of data mining services. This model has several ...

Providing network security is one of the most important tasks in todays Internet. Unfortunately, many users are not able to protect themselves and their networks. Therefore, a novel security concept is presented to protect users by providing security measures at the Internet Service Provider level. Already now, Internet Service Providers are using different security measures, e.g., Virtual Loca...

Cloud computing is an Internet-based computing model. This model enables access to resources and services on demand. Cloud computing users have applications with different Quality of Service requirements. On the other hand, there are different cloud service providers offering services with different qualitative characteristics. Determining the best cloud computing service for a specific applica...

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving towards a cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprises and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of bu...

A new kind of Web-based bioinformatics service is emerging to aid bench scientists. Integrated suites of programs are being hosted on remote servers and being offered as a package for a membership fee, or for free with the option to purchase added value services. The companies providing these Web tools are following a new Internet business strategy known as the Application Service Provider (ASP...

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in different domains and on different levels to establish agreements on Quality of Service (QoS) between a service provider and a customer. SLAs can be based on general agreements like framework agreements. In a grid environment SLA can be technical agreements which deal with properties of services and resources. Research and development in grid computin...

Combinatorial optimization problems are abundant in the telecommunications industry. In this paper, we present four real-world telecommunications applications where combinatorial optimization plays a major role. The first problem concerns the optimal location of modem pools for an internet service provider. The second problem deals with the optimal routing of permanent virtual circuits for a fr...