This study sought to explore the perceptions of stakeholders on the role and effectiveness of networking forums in promoting partnerships and integrated service delivery between government and non-profit sector organisations using the Nelmapius forum as a case study. The research adopted a qualitative research method and a case study research approach was utilized. The research population consisted of social workers and social work supervisors in both government and NGOs who participated in the Nelmapius forum. Purposive sampling which is a type of non-probability sampling was utilized to draw participants for the study. The sample consisted of 11 social workers and 4 social work supervisors who participated in the Nelmapius forum. Data was collected using semi-structured interviews. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the data. The findings reveal that participants understood the primary reason behind the establishment of the Nelmapius forum as to strengthen the relationship between the government and the NGOs in Nelmapius. It was also revealed that the Nelmapius forum was a platform for NGOs and the DHSD to share service delivery information. Findings of the study show that the forum is an effective platform for enhancing partnerships’ among organisations which enhanced integrated service delivery. The forum created a platform which enabled organisations to work cooperatively. This led to capacity building among participant members and their organisations. The forum also enabled organisations to work together to share service delivery channels and processes as well as demarcation areas of service which benefitted the community members. The forum did experience few challenges in its later stages of functioning such as poor attendance, lack of new member integration, and failure to honour commitments by some organisations which led to low of morale amongst forum members. As a way of invigorating the forum participants suggested that: All stakeholders should participate actively in the forum, facilitation of the forum should rotate among members, the forum must be open to all stakeholders, the forum must be attended by senior officials, meeting venues should rotate in different organisations and that there should be monitoring and evaluation systems in place. It is hoped the study will have impact positively on the functioning of networking forums.

Este estudo aborda a utilização das mídias sociais como ferramenta para gestão de marcas. O tema se demonstra relevante por tratar de três assuntos considerados importantes na atualidade: gestão de marcas, marketing de relacionamento e redes sociais no ambiente virtual. A proposta do estudo é explorar se as organizações estão estabelecendo um relacionamento com seus clientes de forma que este promova o brand equity por meio do uso das redes sociais. Para se atingir os objetivos do estudo, foi realizada uma pesquisa exploratória de cunho qualitativo em que os dados foram coletados a partir do método netnográfico, ou seja, a partir da observação das informações que foram disponibilizadas publicamente nas páginas das marcas Coca-Cola, Microsoft e Google no site Facebook. A análise da pesquisa permitiu concluir que as três marcas observadas estão atuando no Facebook com o objetivo de se relacionar com seus consumidores, sendo que seu uso permite o engajamento natural das pessoas - seja por meio das mensagens postadas, que devem ser simples e conter em sua essência um conteúdo que promova o diálogo, a interação e confiança entre os participantes, evitando um teor que fale de si mesmo, ou seja por meio das ferramentas disponibilizadas. / This study addresses the use of social media as a tool for brand management. This is a (highly) relevant theme because it deals with three matters of current importance: brand management, relationship marketing and social networking in the virtual environment. The purpose of this study is to explore whether organizations are establishing a relationship with their customers so as to promote brand equity through the use of social networks. To achieve the objectives of the study, an exploratory qualitative character survey was conducted where data was collected from netnographic method, in other words, from the observation of the information that was publicly available on Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Google\'s pages on Facebook. The research analysis concluded that the three brands are seen using Facebook in order to relate to their customers, and its use promotes the natural engagement of persons - whether through postings, which should be simple and contain in its core a content that promotes dialogue, interaction and trust among participants, thus avoiding the company to speak of itself, or through the tools available.

" IEEE 802.11 wireless access points (APs) act as the central communication hub inside homes, connecting all networked devices to the Internet. Home users run a variety of network applications with diverse Quality-of-Service requirements (QoS) through their APs. However, wireless APs are often the bottleneck in residential networks as broadband connection speeds keep increasing. Because of the lack of QoS support and complicated configuration procedures in most off-the-shelf APs, users can experience QoS degradation with their wireless networks, especially when multiple applications are running concurrently. This dissertation presents CATNAP, Classification And Treatment iN an AP , to provide better QoS support for various applications over residential wireless networks, especially timely delivery for real-time applications and high throughput for download-based applications. CATNAP consists of three major components: supporting functions, classifiers, and treatment modules. The supporting functions collect necessary flow level statistics and feed it into the CATNAP classifiers. Then, the CATNAP classifiers categorize flows along three-dimensions: response-based/non-response-based, interactive/non-interactive, and greedy/non-greedy. Each CATNAP traffic category can be directly mapped to one of the following treatments: push/delay, limited advertised window size/drop, and reserve bandwidth. Based on the classification results, the CATNAP treatment module automatically applies the treatment policy to provide better QoS support. CATNAP is implemented with the NS network simulator, and evaluated against DropTail and Strict Priority Queue (SPQ) under various network and traffic conditions. In most simulation cases, CATNAP provides better QoS supports than DropTail: it lowers queuing delay for multimedia applications such as VoIP, games and video, fairly treats FTP flows with various round trip times, and is even functional when misbehaving UDP traffic is present. Unlike current QoS methods, CATNAP is a plug-and-play solution, automatically classifying and treating flows without any user configuration, or any modification to end hosts or applications. "

Background: This study examines longitudinal associations of frequency of social media use, cyberbullying involvement, and online social network characteristics with depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and mental well-being at one year follow-up in a multi-ethnic sample of early adolescents living in areas of East London characterised by high levels of deprivation. Studies of the impact of adolescent social media use on mental health have primarily used cross-sectional data; longitudinal research is needed to investigate temporality and lasting mental health effects. Method: Longitudinal analyses (n=2480) of data from the NIHR funded Olympic Regeneration in East London (ORiEL) study examined the impact of baseline (aged 12-13) social media use including: frequency of instant messaging (IM) and social networking site (SNS) use, cyberbullying, and online network characteristics (network size and communication with strangers); on adolescent mental health outcomes including depression (measured using the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire), social anxiety (measured using the Mini Social Phobia Inventory) and well-being (measured using the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale) one year later. Results: After adjustment for gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, school and baseline mental health, cybervictims (13.6%) and cyberbully-victims (20.4%) had greater odds of reporting symptoms of depression (victims: OR=1.44, 95% CI [1.00, 2.06]; bully-victims: OR=1.54 95% CI [1.13, 2.09]), and symptoms of social anxiety (victims: OR=1.52, 95% CI [1.11, 2.07]; bully-victims: OR=1.44 95% CI [1.10, 1.89]) than their uninvolved peers. Communication with strangers (24.7%) was also associated with increased odds of depression (OR=1.35, 95% CI [1.04, 1.76]) at follow-up. Conclusions: Poorer mental health outcomes were reported by students who encountered risks online (i.e. those using IM at high frequencies, those who communicated with strangers online, and those victimised by cyberbullying). Given the prevalence of these risk factors, clinicians and public health practitioners should address social media activity when assessing adolescent mental health.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-09-16T13:29:37Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Guilherme Lopes Matsushita.pdf: 2680968 bytes, checksum: b14fa3efa97b57ce3b979654c6c32e12 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-16T13:29:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Guilherme Lopes Matsushita.pdf: 2680968 bytes, checksum: b14fa3efa97b57ce3b979654c6c32e12 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-06 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / With the recent emergence and the explosion of users in social networks, Internet users have come to know more about other people or companies through information obtained from online groups or communities and therefore meet new opportunities. An avalanche of diverse and unstructured information is created every minute, for billions of devices connected to the Internet all the time. Analyze, process, understand and evaluate these data, it’s a challenging task, given the volume, velocity and variety of information from these social networks. However, a better understanding of the process of monitoring networks and the use of tools of this kind are essential for people, companies and the academic world. The application of monitoring systems, information management and the possibility of bringing brands to people, are some positives that this research will provide better knowledge of the problems. In this research will be analyzed monitoring tool of social networks SCUP, its details, its features and the tool related to business management. In conclusion, we present all the peculiarities of the software and the possibilities applicable in the corporate environment, as aid to decision making / Com o surgimento recente e a explosão de usuários nas redes sociais, os internautas passaram a conhecer mais sobre outras pessoas ou empresas por meio de informações obtidas de grupos ou comunidades on-line e assim conhecer novas oportunidades. Uma avalanche de informações diversas e não estruturadas é criada minuto a minuto, por bilhões de dispositivos conectados na Internet à todo o momento. Analisar, processar, compreender e avaliar esses dados, é uma tarefa desafiadora, levando em conta o volume, a velocidade e a variedade das informações obtidas nessas redes sociais. Porém, uma melhor compreensão do processo de monitoramento das redes e a utilização de ferramentas desta natureza, são essenciais para as pessoas, as empresas e para o universo acadêmico. A aplicação de sistemas de monitoramento, a gestão da informação e a possibilidade de aproximar marcas às pessoas, são alguns pontos positivos que esta pesquisa irá apresentar conhecendo melhor a problemática. Nesta pesquisa será analisada a ferramenta de monitoramento de redes sociais SCUP, seus detalhes, suas funcionalidades e a relação da ferramenta com a gestão empresarial. Como conclusão, são apresentadas todas as particularidades do software e as possibilidades aplicáveis no ambiente corporativo, como um auxílio às tomadas de decisão

Container technology has gained popularity in recent years, mainly because it enables a fast and easy way to package, distribute and deploy applications and services. Latency and throughput have a high impact on user satisfaction in many real-time, critical and large-scale online services. Although the use of microservices architecture in cloud-native applications has enabled advantages in terms of application resilience, scalability, fast software delivery and the use of minimal resources, the packet processing rates are not correspondingly higher. This is mainly due to the overhead imposed by the design and architecture of the network stack. Packet processing rates can be improved by making changes to the network stack and without necessarily adding more powerful hardware. In this research, a study of various high-speed packet processing frameworks is presented and a software high-speed packet I/O solution i.e., as hardware agnostic as possible to improve the packet throughput in container technology is identified. The proposed solution is identified based on if the solution involves making changes to the underlying hardware or not. The proposed solution is then evaluated in terms of packet throughput for different container networking modes. A comparison of the proposed solution with a simple UDP client-server application is also presented for different container networking modes. From the results obtained, it is concluded that packet mmap client-server application has higher performance when compared with simple UDP client-server application.

In recent times, there’s been a trend towards setting up smaller clouds at the edge of the network and interconnecting them across multiple sites. In these scenarios, the software used for managing the resources should be flexible enough to scale. Considering OpenStack the most widely used cloud software, It is observed that the compute service has shown performance degradation when the deployment reaches fewer hundreds of nodes. Finding out solutions to address the scalability issue in OpenStack, Ericsson has developed a new architecture that supports massive scalability of OpenStack clouds. However, the challenges with multicloud networking in P2P OpenStack remained unsolved. This thesis work as an extension to Ericsson’s P2P OpenStack project investigates various multi-cloud networking techniques and proposes two decentralized designs for cross Neutron networking in P2P OpenStack. The design-1 is based on OpenStack Tricircle project and design-2 is based on VPNaaS. This thesis work implements VPNaaS design to support the automatic interconnection of Virtual machines that belong to the same user but deployed in different OpenStack clouds. We evaluate this thesis for control plane operation under two different scenarios namely single user case and multiple users cases. In both scenarios, request-response time is chosen as an evaluating parameter. Results show that there is an increase in request-response time when users in the system are increased.

In this thesis, three key issues that restrict networks from scaling up so as to be able to cope with the rapid increase in traffic are investigated and series of approaches are proposed and tested for overcoming them. Firstly, scalability limitations owing to the use of a broadcast mechanism in one collision domain are discussed. To address this matter, servers under software-defined network architectures for eliminating discovery messages (SSED) are designed in this thesis and a backbone of floodless packets in an SDN LAN network is introduced. SSED has an innovative mechanism for defining the relationship between the servers and SDN architecture. Experimental results, after constructing and applying an authentic testbed, verify that SSED has the ability to improve upon the scalability of the traditional mechanism in terms of the number of switches and hosts. This is achieved by removing broadcast packets from the data and control planes as well as offering a better response time. Secondly, the scalability restrictions from using routers and the default gateway mechanism are explained. In this thesis, multiple distributed subnets using SDN architecture and servers to eliminate router devices and the default gateway mechanism (MSSERD) are introduced, designed and implemented as the general backbone for scalable multiple LAN-based networks. MSSERD's proposed components handle address resolution protocol (ARP) discovery packets and general IP packets across different subnets. Moreover, a general view of the network is provided through a multi-subnets discovery protocol (MDP). A 23 computers testbed is built and the results verify that MSSERD scales up the number of subnets more than traditional approaches, enhances the efficiency significantly, especially with high load, improves performance 2.3 times over legacy mechanisms and substantially reduces complexity. Finally, most of the available distributed-based architectures for different domains are reviewed and the aggregation discovery mechanism analysed to establish their impact on network scalability. Subsequently, a general distributed-centralised architecture with open-level control plane (OLC) architecture and a dynamic discovery hierarchical protocol (DHP) is introduced to provide better scalability in an SDN network. OLC can scale up the network with high performance even during high traffic.

As computer networks evolve, they become more complex, introducing several challenges in the areas of performance and management. Such problems can lead to stagnation in network innovation. Software Defined Networks (SDN) framework could be one of the best candidates for improving and revolutionising networking by giving the full control to the network administrators to implement new management and performance optimisation techniques. This thesis examines performance issues faced in SDN due to the introduction of the SDN Controller. These issues include the extra delay due to the round-trip time between the switch and the controller as well as the fact that some packets arrive at the destination out-of-order. We propose a novel dynamic flow installation and management algorithm (OFPE) using the SDN protocol OpenFlow, which preserves the controller to a non-overloaded CPU state and allow it to dynamically add and adjust flow table rules to reduce packet delay and out-of-order packets. In addition, we propose OFPEX, an extension to OFPE algorithm that includes techniques for managing multi-switch environments as well as methods that make use of the packets interarrival time in categorising and serving packet flows. Such techniques allow topology awareness, helping the controller to install flow table rules in such a way to form optimal routes for high priority flows thus increasing network performance. For the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithms, both hardware testbed as well as emulation experiments have been conducted. The performance results indicate that OFPE algorithm achieves a significant enhancement in performance in the form of reduced delay by up to 92.56% (depending on the scenario), reduced packet loss by up to 55.32% and reduced out-of-order packets by up to 69.44%. Furthermore, we propose a novel placement algorithm for distributed Mininet implementations which uses weights in order to distribute the experiment components to the appropriately distributed machines. The proposed algorithm uses static code analysis in order to examine the experimental code as well as it measures the capabilities of physical components in order to create a weights table which is then used to distribute the experiment components properly. The performance results of the proposed algorithm evaluation indicated reductions in delay and packet loss of up to 65.51% and 86.35% respectively, as well as a decrease in the standard deviation of CPU usage by up to 88.63%. These results indicate that the proposed algorithm distributes the experiment components evenly across the available resources. Finally, we propose a series of Benchmarking tests that can be used to rate all the available SDN experimental platforms. These tests allow the selection of the appropriate experimental platform according to the scenario needs as well as they indicate the resources needed by each platform.

Social networking platforms (SNPs) are complex distributed software applications exhibiting many challenges related to data portability. Since existing platforms are propriety in design, users cannot easily share their data with other SNPs, however decentralisation of social networking platforms can provide a solution to this problem. There is a difference of opinion, the way the research and developer communities have pursued this issue. Existing approaches used in decentralisation provide limited structural detail and lack in providing a systematic framework of design activities. There is a need for an architectural framework based on standardised software architectural principles and technologies to guide the design and development of decentralised social networking platforms in order to improve the level of both data portability and interoperability. The main aim of this research is to develop an architectural solution to achieve data portability among SNPs via decentralisation. Existing proposed decentralised platforms are based on a distributed structure and are mainly for a specific aspect such as access control or security and privacy. In addition to this, existing approaches lack in practicality due to underdeveloped and non-standardised design. To solve these issues a new architectural framework is needed, which can provide design and development guidelines for the decentralised social networking platform. The goal of this thesis is to study, design and develop an architectural framework for social networking platforms that can incorporate the requirements of the decentralisation, to make portability possible. The synergies between the software engineering principles and social web technologies are investigated to create a standard approach. The proposed architecture is based on component-based software development (CBSD) and aspect-oriented software development (AOSD), a unified approach known as CAM (Component Aspect Model). The foundations of the proposed architecture are based on decentralised social networking architecture (DSNA), architectural style which is derived from CAM. Components and aspects are the building blocks of the proposed decentralised social networking platform architecture. From a development perspective, each component represents a social network functionality and aspects represent the properties and preferences that are used to decentralise the functionality. The model for the component composition is a major challenge because the use of CAM for social networks has not been attempted before. The proposed architecture comprehensively integrates the DSNA architectural style into each architectural component. Portability among SNPs by means of decentralisation can be summarised into three steps. (1) Definition of the architectural style, (2) implementation of the architectural style into components and (3) integration of the component composition. To date component composition approaches have not been used for social networks as a way to develop social network functionality. The concept of middleware has been adapted to achieve the composition feature of the architecture. In the architecture Social Network Support Layer (SNSL) functions as middleware to facilitate component composition. Existing middleware solutions still lack integration of CBSD and AOSD concepts. This limitation is characterised by, a lack of explicit guidelines for composition, a lack of declarative specification and definition model to express component composition and a lack of support for role allocation. This research overcome these limitations. The application of the architecture is based on the W3C SWAT (Social Web Acid Test) scenario. A Messaging application is developed to evaluate the scenario based on the Design Science Research Methodology. The architectural style is defined in the first stage of design followed by the component-based architecture. The architectural style is defined to guide the architecture and the component composition model. In the second stage, the design and implementation of composition technology (that is SNSL) are developed with architectural style and the rules defined in the first stage. The refined version of the architecture is evaluated in the third stage, according to WC3 SWAT test. The definitive version of the proposed architecture with the benchmarked result can be used to design and build social networking platforms, allowing users to share and collaborate information across the different social networking platforms.