BACKGROUND Typically, little consideration is given to the allocation of indirect costs (overheads and capital) to hospital services, compared to the allocation of direct costs. Weighted service allocation is believed to provide the most accurate indirect cost estimation, but the method is time consuming. OBJECTIVE To determine whether hourly rate, inpatient day, and marginal mark-up allocati...

We address the problem of joint path selection and rate allocation in multipath streaming in order to optimize a media specific quality of service. An optimization problem is proposed, which aims at minimizing a video distortion metric based on sequence-dependent parameters, and transmission channel characteristics, for a given network infrastructure. Even if in general, optimal path selection ...

This paper addresses the optimal rate allocation problem in overlay content distribution for efficient utilization of limited bandwidths. We systematically present a series of optimal rate allocation strategies by dividing our discussions into four typical scenarios. Based on application-specific requirements, these scenarios reflect the contrast between elastic and streaming content distributi...

In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of guaranteed time slot allocation in cluster-tree WSNs. Our design uses the so-called Network Utility Maximization (NUM) approach as far as we aim to provide a fair distribution of the available resources. From the point of view of implementation, we extend here the authors' proposed Coupled-Decompositions Method (CDM) in order to compute the...

The performance of multicarrier systems can be enhanced by the water filling strategy, in which different rates and powers are allocated to subcarriers. However, the induced large signalling overhead leads to less transmission efficiency. To suppress this effect this article proposes an alternative strategy by dynamically assigning the same rate to each subcarrier per user. First, we quantify t...