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The article interprets the early experience of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in terms of the market for technological mediation. A firm involved in technology mediation takes advantage of gaps between general technological opportunities and particular user needs in specific places at particular times. If the economic opportunities are renewed frequently, then the business can grow and adapt to take advantage of them. This concept provides a framework for explaining many facets of business behavior accompanying the diffusion of Internet access technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of physical objects connected to the Internet constantly grows and a common thought says the IoT scenario will change the way we live and work. Since IoT technologies have the potential to be pervasive in almost every aspect of a human life, in this paper, we deeply analyze the IoT scenario. First, we describe IoT in simple terms and then we investigate what current technologies can achieve. Our analysis shows four major issues that may limit the use of IoT (i.e., interoperability, security, privacy, and business models) and it highlights possible solutions to solve these problems. Finally, we provide a simulation analysis that emphasizes issues and suggests practical research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cellular network-based machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is fast becoming a market-changing force for a wide spectrum of businesses and applications such as telematics, smart metering, point-of-sale terminals, and home security and automation systems. In this paper, we aim to answer the following important question: Does traffic generated by M2M devices impose new requirements and challenges for cellular network design and management? To answer this question, we take a first look at the characteristics of M2M traffic and compare it to traditional smartphone traffic. We have conducted our measurement analysis using a week-long traffic trace collected from a tier-1 cellular network in the US. We characterize M2M traffic from a wide range of perspectives, including temporal dynamics, device mobility, application usage, and network performance. Our experimental results show that M2M traffic exhibits significantly different patterns than smartphone traffic in multiple aspects. For instance, M2M devices have a much larger ratio of uplink-to-downlink traffic volume, their traffic typically exhibits different diurnal patterns, they are more likely to generate synchronized traffic resulting in bursty aggregate traffic volumes, and are less mobile compared to smartphones. On the other hand, we also find that M2M devices are generally competing with smartphones for network resources in co-located geographical regions. These and other findings suggest that better protocol design, more careful spectrum allocation, and modified pricing schemes may be needed to accommodate the rise of M2M devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Web services providing E-commerce capabilities to support business transactions over the Internet are more and more widespread. The development of such services involves several security issues ranging from authentication to the management of the access to shared resources according to a given business model. The capability of validating designs against fast evolving requirements is of paramount importance for the adaptation of business models to changing regulations and rapidly evolving market needs. So, techniques for the specification and automated analysis of web services to be used in security-sensitive applications are crucial in the development of these systems. In this paper, we propose an extension of the relational transducers introduced by Abiteboul, Vianu, Fordham, and Yesha for the specification of the transaction protocols of web services and their security properties. We investigate the decidability of relevant verification problems such as goal reachability (for the validation of use-case scenarios) and log validation (for detecting frauds) and provide sufficient conditions for their decidability. The extension we propose is two-fold. First, we add constraints to specify the algebraic structure of the resources manipulated by the transducers. Second, recursion is allowed (only) in policy rules to express important policy idioms such as delegation. Technically, decidability is obtained by a reduction to a decidable class of first-order formulae and fix-point computation to handle recursion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Peer to peer networking has emerged as viable business model and systems architecture for internet scale application since it attracts millions of simultaneous participants. In P2P overlay network (collection of peer connections in a P2P network) peers join and leave the overlay arbitrarily and do not stay in the overlay for a predictable time. To ensure dependability of the overlay, peers with neighbor links to the joining or leaving peers requires updates. Therefore overlay maintenance protocols have to be devised to include efficient features that able to handle peer churn. In this paper we are focusing on the P2P overlay maintenance protocol through which the peers in the overlay maintains routing properties, referred as overlay maintenance. We have proposed an efficient method to find stale routing table entries in a way that retains the desired routing behavior since the look up query traffic and overlay maintenance traffic both compete for the underlying network bandwidth and resources, maintenance traffic should be constrained to that needed for target table accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating Finite State Machines (CFSM) lack the high level syntactic and structural abstractions of Communicating Complex State Machines (CCSM), such as nesting and encapsulation, to model highly complex protocols that are likely to arise in web services environments. The incorporation of these features in a protocol specification model would require the design of a new validation technique to efficiently check for protocol errors, such as deadlocks and non-reachable transitions. A reachability graph is used to represent the execution states of the protocol and to verify their consistency. In this paper, we propose a new validation technique for protocols modeled with complex FSM, called RLRA (Reverse Leaping Reachability Analysis), which enables the detection of all deadlock errors. It is a backtracking approach, which first identifies an initial set of suspected states, those possibly containing deadlocks, then refines this set to those likely to cause deadlock, and finally backtracks through the graph while checking for errors until the root state of the protocol is reached. Leap graphs are employed to prune the number of execution states examined, and thereby mitigate the combinatorial explosion of the state space. Extensive tests and comparisons were performed, which show the effectiveness of our technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision Support Systems (DSS) form a specific class of computerized information systems that support business and managerial decision-making activities. Making the right decision in business primarily depends on the quality of data. It also depends on the ability to analyze the data with a view to identifying trends that can suggest solutions and strategies. A "cooperative" decision support system means the data are collected, analyzed and then provided to a human agent who can help the system to revise or refine the data. It means that both a human component and computer component work together to come up with the best solution. This paper describes the usage of a software product (Vanguard System) to a specific economic application (evaluating the financial risk assuming that the rate of the economic profitability can be under the value of the interest rate). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments towards Next Generation Networks (NGN) have a strong impact on the design of the markets for electronic communications in general, but specifically on intercarrier relations with respect to interconnection and access. Due to the fact that competition in the European telecommunications environment has brought about alternative providers and their business models it is an interesting area to investigate how these business models will develop in an NGN environment and which (additional) business models may emerge in the future. To that end, the current paper looks at the development of different business models in the PSTN world and likely developments in the NGN world. This leads to conclusions with respect to requirements of the future regulatory framework of next generation networks in order to maintain the achievements of competition in the telecommunications area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control plane technologies will play a major role in next generation transport networks. Many publications and standards claim that approaches like Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) and Automatically Switched Optical Networks/Transport Networks (ASON/ASTN) will simplify network operation and will enable new services. In this paper, an approach is presented to analyze the business processes of transport network operators. The main operator processes are mapped to the well-known value chain concepts of Porter. This allows investigating the advantages of control plane technologies from an economic point of view. This paper shows that the introduction of control plane technology affects the business of the individual operators as well as the overall value system they form as a virtual enterprise. Moreover new business opportunities are identified and two business cases are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SONET/SDH systems have been the preferred transport technology over fiber optics for almost two decades now. Carriers have developed extensive expertise in operating, managing, and developing business models for these systems. Manufacturers' technical expertise in such systems has increased to a deep understanding of what transport over fiber is about. In short, SONET/SDH can be called a mature transport technology. Out of this mature expertise, new techniques for bettering transport over fiber services have appeared. These techniques are likely to considerably reshape the next generation of SONET/SDH systems in many aspects: new transport techniques, new transport services, new management systems and business models. We describe several new transport techniques, and discuss their impact on the creation of new transport services for next-generation SONET/SDH systems [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on the initiative of publishing industries towards international copyright issues. The Newspaper Association of America has participated in the establishment of the Automated Content Access Protocol in London, England. It is stated that the protocol is a joint effort of the publishing industries to open technical standards including control access to copyright material for newspapers, magazines and book publishers. It is emphasized that the standard will be designed to be agnostic of business models while ensuring appropriate distribution of revenues.