Cooperation in ad hoc networks cannot be taken for granted when nodes belong to distinct authoritative domains. In this paper we present Cashflow, a virtual currency system to motivate nodes to participate in ad hoc networks and to prevent selfishness. This system is different to previously proposed virtual currency systems in that it uses a channel concept for data transmission as well as a ma...

This paper introduces a novel approach to support processes within generic platforms for virtual enterprises (VEs): the contextbased approach. The main advantage of the approach lies in its generic capacity, which allows the users to define processes flexibly and to support their own virtual enterprises. Constructs such as contexts and subcontexts are used to define processes and can be stored ...

Today's economic crisis has led to bankruptcy of many successful, but usually large-sized enterprises. This brought into question the future of large-sized enterprises. However, the only alternative to largesized enterprises (LEs) is networking of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) into Regional Production Networks (RPNet). RPNet is non-hierarchical organizational form in which every SME...

Recent advances of virtual networking technologies are gradually forcing companies to focus their knowledge management efforts to external knowledge resources, in order to complement their existing knowledge bases, find expertise, but also harness collective intelligence that is dynamically produced in the virtual environment. Access, exchange and co-creation of customer knowledge is of central...

Distributed virtual environments are rapidly gaining in popularity for the implementation of intuitive and collaborative workspaces. In distributed virtual environments, geographically dispersed user sites possess considerable capabilities for computing and cooperation with other user sites. Primary challenges that have to be addressed by these systems are compensating network latency jitters, ...

Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network struc...

In ultra-dense networks (UDNs), distributed radio access points (RAPs) are configured into small virtual cells around mobile users for fair and high-throughput services. In this correspondence, we evaluate the performance of user-centric joint transmission (JT) in a UDN with a number of virtual cells. In contrast to existing cooperation schemes, which assume constant RAP transmit power, we cons...

Recent studies have called attention to the improvement of “collaborative resilience” by fostering the collaboration potentials of public and private stakeholders during disasters. With our research we consider real and virtual volunteers in order to detect conditions for cooperation among those citizen groups through social media. Therefore we analysed the usage of Twitter during a tornado cri...

Decreasing innovation cycles, changing market situations as well as growing spe-cialisation in individual market segments demand new ways of economic thinking, increasingly forcing enterprises into cooperations, sometimes even with direct competitors. Presently discussed and designated as the corporate and cooperation model of the future is the so-called virtual enterprise. In this paper, we ad...

Room metaphors have become increasingly popular as a basis for CSCW systems. This paper describes how such metaphors might be extended to support large scale communication through the introduction of a spatial model for meditating conversations in virtual computer spaces. The model is described in terms of an abstract mathematical framework and the paper then outlines how this might be applied ...