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Mobile edge computing is popular for providing services with low latency and high privacy. It becomes more powerful by leveraging the widely deployed Small cell Base Stations (SBS) with zooming cells for energy-efficient service placement. However, the literature ignores the joint optimization of SBS power control and service placement. The Quality of Services (QoS) guarantee is also challenging, taking into account the component dependency and parallelization in multi-component services and the resource slicing for separated service deployment. Moreover, prior works assume the same amount of allocated resources of links on a placed path for service edge allocation, leading to the ossification of resource allocation and inevitable resource fragments. Towards the above challenges, this paper addresses the energy-efficient and flexible service placement in cell zooming enabled Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) networks. The delay of multi-component services is constructed depending on the allocated resource slice. Besides, the joint optimization of service placement and SBS power control is formulated and transformed into a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). More importantly, the equivalent bandwidth for an edge allocation is defined and analyzed to obtain flexible edge placement with minimum resource cost. Leveraging the results of MILP, an Energy-efficient Service placement algorithm based on equivalent Bandwidth in Cell zooming enabled MEC networks (ESBC) is proposed to improve the probability of successful service placement with QoS guarantee by optimizing the delay distribution among components and edges and reducing resource fragments. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Cervical cancer, the only gynecological malignancy for which a clear pathogeny has been established, has an incidence rate only second to breast cancer. Objective. In our study, we aim to investigate the clinical effect of laparoscopic radical surgery combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy in treating cervical cancer and its influence on postoperative complications and adverse reaction rates. Methods. Cervical cancer patients admitted to our hospital from August 2018 to May 2020 were retrospectively analyzed as the research object and divided into the control group and the experimental group by the draw method, with 50 cases in each group. The laparoscopic radical surgery was performed on the control group, and the laparoscopic radical surgery combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy was performed on the experimental group to compare their effective rates, adverse reaction rates, postoperative complication rates, expression levels of serum tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and soluble interleukin-2 receptor (SIL-2R) inside the body before surgery and at one week after surgery, quality of life (QLI) scores, and Mental Status Scale in Nonpsychiatric Settings (MSSNS) scores. Results. Compared with the control group, the experimental group obtained significantly higher effective rate and QLI scores (P < 0.05) and significantly lower adverse reaction rates, postoperative complication rates, expression levels of serum TNF-α and SIL-2R inside the body at one week after surgery, and MSSNS scores (P < 0.05), with statistical differences; before surgery, the TNF-α and SIL-2R expression levels of the two groups were not significantly different (P > 0.05), but the levels at one week after surgery were significantly lower than those before, indicating statistical significance (P < 0.05). Conclusion. The clinical effect of laparoscopic radical surgery combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy can obviously improve the effective rate of cervical cancer patients and lower the incidence rates of postoperative complications and adverse reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To overcome the Internet ossification, network virtualization has been proposed as a promising method because of its advantages (e.g., on-demand and efficient resource allocation). Virtual network embedding (VNE) is one of the main challenges for network virtualization. Energy costs of servers in data centers (DCs) aremajor contributions to the power consumption in information and communication technology. Therefore, VNE should consider both acceptance ratio and power consumption. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model is proposed with the objective of minimizing the total power consumption in software- defined optical data center networks by reducing the active data centers and power-consuming network components. In addition, the coordinates of nodes and delay of links are considered for a more realistic scenario. Compared with the existing node ranking method, the proposed global topology resource (GTR) can effectively evaluate the possibility of each DC node to host virtual nodes. Based on the GTR method, we propose a location-aware energy efficient VNE algorithm, namely GTR-VNE. Simulation results show that GTR-VNE can obtain up to 9.3% and 5% improvement of power consumption and acceptance ratio compared with benchmarks. Furthermore, based on GTR and artificial intelligence ant colony optimization (ACO), another energy efficient algorithm, ACO-VNE, is proposed.ACO-VNE can obtain up to 28.7% improvement in power consumption compared with GTR-VNE. In addition, ACO-VNE has better performance in terms of revenue cost ratio and acceptance ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) might promote nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) initiation and progression, the involved molecular mechanisms remain largely unclear. Here, we discovered the novel LncRNA, prostate cancer associated transcript 7 (PCAT7), which was overexpressed and associated with worse prognosis in NPC. Decreased PCAT7 expression was found to significantly suppress tumor cell proliferation in vitro, and inhibited tumor growth and reduced the expression of proliferation antigen Ki-67 in vivo. Rescue assay was performed to further confirm that PCAT7 contributed to the progression of NPC through regulating miR-134-5p/ELF2 signal pathway. These results indicated that PCAT7 might contribute to the tumor progression in NPC by functioning as a ceRNA to sponge miR-134-5p. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract?Hybrid fiber-wireless (FiWi) networks, which benefit from high bandwidth and ubiquitous access of optical and wireless networks, have been identified as a promising technology candidate for next-generation broadband access. As various component/fiber failures may occur in hybrid FiWi networks, thus affecting huge numbers of end users, survivability has become one of the key important deployment considerations in such networks. This paper focuses on developing optimal network planning strategies to achieve survivable hybrid FiWi networks. In particular, to address the additional cost involved in deploying backup fibers in previously proposed redundancy strategies against distribution fiber failures, we propose the use of wireless routing through the ubiquitous wireless coverage of end users in a hybrid FiWi network. We present an optimization framework to optimally plan and deploy a survivable hybrid FiWi network, where traffic from an affected optical network unit (ONU) can be effectively rerouted to backup ONUs through wireless connections in the event of a distribution fiber failure. However, focusing only on the resilience of a network without considering its cost, and ignoring the resultant capacity, latency, and coverage under normal and protection operating conditions, is impractical. Our proposed framework therefore ensures maximum end-user coverage whilst satisfying survivability, connectivity, delay, and capacity constraints of the network, by optimizing the placement of passive optical splitters, ONUs, and wireless routers in conjunction with fiber and wireless connections. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of our framework in the context of an urban deployment under different deployment scenarios. In particular, our results provide insight into how survivable FiWi networks can be deployed without compromising on the latency, coverage, and capacity requirements of such networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the massive deployment of electrical network devices, Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network has to suffer from the challenge of high energy consumption. With the ever-increasing eager for green communication infrastructure, the issue of high energy consumption may become one of the major barriers for the advance of FiWi access network. Previous works proposed for green FiWi access network cover three aspects, including the optimized deployment of network devices such as optical network units (ONUs), the energy-efficient bandwidth allocation of ONUs with QoS guarantee, and the dynamic power states scheduling of ONUs (i.e., active/sleep) according to their traffic profile. However, these works did not take the energy-saving design of wireless subnetwork into account simultaneously. In fact, when some ONUs in the optical subnetwork are switched into sleep states, part of the radio interfaces originally forwarding traffic to the sleep ONUs would be idle or low-loaded. This provides a potential opportunity for energy-saving in wireless subnetwork by switching off the idle or low-loaded radios. This paper focuses on the design of green multi-radio FiWi access network by integrating the energy-savings of optical and wireless subnetworks. To support the energy-efficient design, the new power states are defined for ONUs and radios, respectively. Aiming at dynamic traffic profile, the heuristic algorithms are proposed for the energy saving of integrated wireless front-end and optical back-end of FiWi access network. First, the Energy-saving algorithm with ONU sleep mechanism (EAS) is proposed to dynamically schedule the power states of ONUs by judging their traffic profile with load thresholds. Then, the Energy-saving algorithm based on Radios Off (ERO) is proposed to reconfigure the topology of wireless subnetwork by controlling the power states of radios dynamically. Moreover, wireless rerouting is employed in both EAS and ERO to guarantee the QoS provisioning ability of network. Finally, a comprehensive energy-saving scheme called EE is proposed by combining the EAS and ERO algorithms strategically. Simulation results show that with the reasonable setting of parameters, the proposed EE scheme can save the energy of 33.14% to 64.35% and 8.56% to 36.42% in a wide range of traffic load compared to the No-energy-saving and QoS-aware energy-saving scenarios, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High energy consumption in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) has caused intense research on energy-saving methods in recent years. The most common method for EPON energy saving is to cause optical network units (ONUs) to sleep which are idle or low loaded. With the popularity of multimedia applications, the ONUs carry not only unicast traffic but also more and more multicast traffic. However, existing studies mainly focus on ONUs that support only unicast traffic. The many differences between multicast traffic and unicast traffic make it necessary to design novel energy-saving methods. This paper proposes a multicast-traffic-oriented energy-saving algorithm for EPONs, called the energy-saving algorithm for multicast traffic (ESMT). To save as much energy as possible, the proposed algorithm uses a hybrid sleep mode (composed of a deep sleep state and an independent sleep mode) in which not only can ONU enter a deep sleep state, but also the ONU transmitter and receiver can sleep independently. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, which is oriented to multicast traffic in EPONs, is more energy efficient than other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network is now becoming a promising architecture for access networks. Survivability is one of the key issues in the planning of FiWi access network because many high-rate traffic flows may be interrupted in case of a single fiber failure, which can cause a huge traffic loss. In addition, the users need ubiquitous broadband access that can be provided by FiWi access network. In this paper, we propose the protection approach called Maximum Covering Planning with Survivability (MCPS), including Integer Linear Programming (ILP) solution and heuristic solution, for the planning of survivable FiWi access network against single distribution fiber failure. The proposed approach aims at maximum coverage under the constraints of network connectivity. When a distribution fiber is broken, the interrupted Optical Network Unit (ONU) can transmit traffic to its backup ONU through the wireless paths between them. Simulation results show the network coverage of clients for different number of ONUs in different urban areas, and demonstrate the relationship between network coverage and the cost represented by the number of WiFi routers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]