Recent years have seen a tremendous growth of interests in streaming continuous media such as video data over the Internet. This would create an enormous increase in the demand on various server and networking resources. To minimize service delays and to reduce loads placed on these resources, we propose an Overlay Caching Scheme (OCS) for overlay networks. OCS utilizes virtual cache structures...

This article studies a supply chain composed of a manufacturer and two competing retailers. The manufacturer produces two substitutable products and offers respective service levels to customers who buy one of the two products. Each retailer can only order one kind of product from the manufacturer, and then sell them to the market at a certain sale price. The demands for two products are influe...

Logistics and Supply Chain Management literature indicates that customer service management has become a strategic issue for companies in the new millennium. By improving logistics performances, companies increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. The aim of this paper is to propose an original approach for the management of customer service. The approach is based on the quality fun...

Pervasive computing appears like a new computing era based on networks of objects and devices evolving in a real world, radically different from distributed computing, based on networks of computers and data storages. Contrary to most context-aware approaches, we work on the assumption that pervasive software must be able to deal with a dynamic software environment before processing contextual ...

In this paper we focus on the modeling and simulation of a distribution service network (DSN) for urban rail transit hub (URTH). Firstly, using the method of complex networks, the concept of DSN is proposed. Secondly, a model of DSN is formulated which consists of: i) a distribution entity topology network, ii) a distribution transport function network and iii) a distribution service function n...

This paper presents a power management scheme that maximizes energy saving in wireless ad hoc networks while still meeting the required quality of service (QoS). We assume that battery-powered devices can be remotely activated by a waking-up signal using a simple circuit based on RF tag technology. In this way, devices that are not currently active may enter a sleep state and power up only when...

Today’s networks, including WLANs, transport different classes of services. A service differentiation is then essential to provide QoS. However, IEEE 802.11 for WLANs was primarily designed for best effort traffic and did not provide QoS specifications. IEEE 802.11e MAC has been then described to support QoS in WLAN. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for service differentiation which is ba...

A community could be defined as a collection of Web services which share a common set of functionalities (e.g., auctions management, flights booking, etc.). Services involved in the same community are differentiated for each other according to their non-functional properties (reliability, performances, reputation, etc.). Communities could then be viewed as an intermediate level of abstraction b...

Utility restructuring, technology evolution, public environmental policy, and expanding power demand are providing the opportunity for microturbines and fuel cells to become important energy resources. Deregulation has begun to allow for the provision of various ancillary services, such as load-following. In order to investigate the ancillary services ability of these units in distribution syst...