ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The focus of the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project is to enhance the current telemetry technology (IRIG106) and still maintain the reliability of the current technology. The Mixed Networking environment is composed of a wired network based on standard 802.11 and a modified wireless based on 802.11. Determining the viability of the networking scheme within the iNET project is critical. The QoS features such as delay and jitter are measures of performance specified by user conditions. These QoS features are measured against current legacy links. This paper will show a comparison of the three QoS levels (best effort, assured, and premium services) that the network provides and investigate QoS performance of the Mixed Network in the iNET environment. This will provide a framework for assessing the strength and weakness of the Mixed Network as well as scoping further research.

With the rising popularity of Voice over IP (VoIP) services, understanding the effects of a global network on Quality of Service is critical for the providers of VoIP applications. This thesis builds on a model that analyzes the round trip time, packet delay jitter, and packet loss between endpoints on an Autonomous System (AS) level, extending it by mapping AS pairs onto an Internet topology. This model is used to produce a mean opinion score estimate. The mapping is introduced to reduce the size of the problem in order to improve computation times and improve accuracy of estimates. The results of testing show that estimating mean opinion score from this model is not desirable. It also shows that the path mapping does not affect accuracy, but does improve computation times as the input data grows in volume.

The rise of business-oriented and commercial applications for Grid computing environments has recently gathered pace. Grid computing traditionally has been linked with scientific environments, where heterogeneous resources provided by Grid systems and infrastructures were employed for carrying out computationally-intensive and data-intensive scientific experiments or applications that may have not been possible before. The natural progression is that business-oriented applications will look to build on this success and utilise the large number of heterogeneous Grid resources including computational resources such as CPUs and memory and storage resources such as disk space, potentially available. The success of introducing these applications into the mainstream is directly related to whether service providers can deliver a level of Quality of Service (QoS) to a consumer and the ability of the consumer to request high-level QoS such as the numbers of CPUs required or the RAM required. QoS refers to the guidelines and requirements requested by a user/consumer from the service providers and resources. The communication and agreement establishment processes between user and provider must be defined clearly to accommodate a new type of user where knowledge of the underlying infrastructure cannot be assumed. QoS parameters have generally been defined at the Grid resource level using low level definitions. This tailors to specific applications and models related to scientific domains where brokering, scheduling and QoS delivery is designed for specific applications within specific domains. This thesis presents a flexible model for high-level QoS requests. Business Grid Quality of Service (BGQoS) is introduced for business-oriented and commercial Grid applications which may wish to make use of the resources made available by Grid system environments. BGQoS allows GRCs (Grid Resource Consumers) to specify varying types of high-level QoS requirements which are delivered via querying up-to-date resource information, matchmaking and monitoring operations. Moreover, we present dynamically calculated metrics for measuring QoS such as reliability, increasing the accuracy of meeting the GRC’s requirements. On the other hand GRPs (Grid Resource Provider) are also capable of advertising their resources, their capabilities, their usage policies and availability both locally and globally. This leads to a flexible model that could be carried across domains without altering the core operations and which could easily be expanded in order to accommodate different types of GRC, resources and applications.

Iraq may be considered as the largest wireless market in the Gulf region. A key driving factor in the market of wireless communication, it has seen enormous growth in the mobile phone market over the last five years leading to almost 24 million subscribers in 2011. Moreover, there are several technologies and services working in Iraq; three GSM Operators, three CDMA national operators and three CDMA provinces operators. The recent growth in the mobile phone market is based on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standards creating the next-generation wireless technologies in the Iraqi Wireless Communication market. One of the essential issues of this research is to investigate the performance of the decreased Quality Of Service (QoS) caused by interferences in the services on GSM/CDMA operators in Iraq. Many issues should be studied and taken into consideration, such as; does the Multi-Coalition Forces cause the interferences, jamming, higher rate of calls drop and false ringing; or are they caused by bad design and planning? Do we need to optimise our network due to the large number of users? All these factors are investigated and the measurements of most service providers and government agencies will be gathered. A detailed analysis was included from the providers with measurements of performance and the reasons for the deterioration of wireless services. The novel contributions of this thesis is the extensive radio measurement campaign over the three mobile an CDMA operator networks and the analysis and recommendations that were drawn to suggest the best approach to improve the QoS of Wireless communication technologies. Awareness of actual reasons behind the deterioration of services will be raised to the Iraqi Government, CMC and the wireless service providers.

Managed Bandwidth Services (MBSs) use Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to effectively control traffic flows and reduce network delay. In the past, the provision of MBS in a global manufacturing enterprise was a difficult task for network administrators. However, advances in recently emerging technologies, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS), Integrated Services (IntServ), Differentiated Services (DiffServ), and Constraint-based Routing (CBR), hold promise to make MBS implementation more manageable. QoS technologies, such as DiffServ and IntServ, offer the benefits of better application performance and delivery of reliable network service. As a consequence of network traffic loads, packet congestion and latency increases still exist and must be addressed by enterprises that intend to support an MBS solution. In this investigation, the author addressed an issue that is faced by many large manufacturing enterprises, i.e., the addition of latency and congestion sensitive traffic such as Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) to networks with limited bandwidth. The goal of this research was to provide global manufacturing enterprises with a model for bandwidth management in their offices and plants. This model was based on findings from a case study of traffic management at American Standard Companies.

Quality of Service (QoS) routing considered as one of the major components of the QoS framework in communication networks. The concept of QoS routing has emerged from the fact that routers direct traffic from source to destination, depending on data types, network constraints and requirements to achieve network performance efficiency. It has been introduced to administer, monitor and improve the performance of computer networks. Many QoS routing algorithms are used to maximize network performance by balancing traffic distributed over multiple paths. Its major components include bandwidth, delay, jitter, cost, and loss probability in order to measure the end users' requirements, optimize network resource usage and balance traffic load. The majority of existing QoS algorithms require the maintenance of the global network state information and use it to make routing decisions. The global QoS network state needs to be exchanged periodically among routers since the efficiency of a routing algorithm depends on the accuracy of link-state information. However, most of QoS routing algorithms suffer from scalability problems, because of the high communication overhead and the high computation effort associated with marinating and distributing the global state information to each node in the network. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to enhancing the scalability of QoS routing algorithms. Motivated by this, the thesis is focused on localized QoS routing that is proposed to achieve QoS guarantees and overcome the problems of using global network state information such as high communication overhead caused by frequent state information updates, inaccuracy of link-state information for large QoS state update intervals and the route oscillating due to the view of state information. Using such an approach, the source node makes its own routing decisions based on the information that is local to each node in the path. Localized QoS routing does not need the global network state to be exchanged among network nodes because it infers the network state and avoids all the problems associated with it, like high communication and processing overheads and oscillating behaviour. In localized QoS routing each source node is required to first determine a set of candidate paths to each possible destination. In this thesis we have developed localized QoS routing algorithms that select a path based on its quality to satisfy the connection requirements. In the first part of the thesis a localized routing algorithm has been developed that relies on the average residual bandwidth that each path can support to make routing decisions. In the second part of the thesis, we have developed a localized delay-based QoS routing (DBR) algorithm which relies on a delay constraint that each path satisfies to make routing decisions. We also modify credit-based routing (CBR) so that this uses delay instead of bandwidth. Finally, we have developed a localized QoS routing algorithm for routing in two levels of a hierarchal network and this relies on residual bandwidth to make routing decisions in a hierarchical network like the internet. We have compared the performance of the proposed localized routing algorithms with other localized and global QoS routing algorithms under different ranges of workloads, system parameters and network topologies. Simulation results have indicated that the proposed algorithms indeed outperform algorithms that use the basics of schemes that currently operate on the internet, even for a small update interval of link state. The proposed algorithms have also reduced the routing overhead significantly and utilize network resources efficiently.

Localised QoS routing is a relatively new, alternative and viable approach to solve the problems of traditional QoS routing algorithms which use global state information resulting in the imposition of a large communication overhead and route flapping. They make use of a localised view of the network QoS state in source nodes to select paths and route flows to destination nodes. Proportional Sticky Routing (PSR) and Credit Based Routing (CBR) have been proposed as localised QoS routing schemes and these can offer comparable performances. However, since network state information for a specific path is only updated when the path is used, PSR and CBR operate with decision criteria that are often stale for paths that are used infrequently. The aim of this thesis is to focus on localised QoS routing and contribute to enhancing the scalability of QoS routing algorithms. In this thesis we have developed three new localised QoS routing schemes which are called Score Based QoS Routing (SBR), Bandwidth Based QoS Routing (BBR) and Delay Based Routing (DBR). In some of these schemes, the path setup procedure is distributed and uses the current network state to make decisions thus avoiding problems of staleness. The methods also avoid any complicated calculations. Both SBR and BBR use bandwidth as the QoS metric and mean delay is used as the QoS metric in DBR. Extensive simulations are applied to compare the performance of our proposed algorithms with CBR and the global Dijkstra's algorithm for different update intervals of link state, different network topologies and using different flow arrival distributions under a wide range of traffic loads. It is demonstrated by simulation that the three proposed algorithms offer a superior performance under comparable conditions to the other localised and global algorithms.

This dissertation is a microanalytic investigation of professional communication in beauty salons in the United States and Japan. In particular, it centers on the analysis of a common, yet very important occurrence found in cosmetology sessions: what I call the "service-assessment sequence", in which service-provider and client determine whether or not the completed work in a given session is adequate. This is a crucial moment in the haircutting activity (and in other fields of the service industry) in order to bring a satisfactory closure to the session, as well as maintain a healthy relationship for future sessions, retain clients in general, and ensure client satisfaction overall. Using the methodological frameworks of microethnography and conversation analysis, I examine the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction, focusing on how participants smoothly conduct the service-assessment sequence and how they achieve the successful completion of a service encounter through a number of tactics. The findings include: the participants' systematic coordination of talk and physical inspection through multiple second pair parts; the participants' coordination of talk and action to negotiate sequence closure; the participants' professional use of head nods in the middle of physical inspection and at sequence completion during service encounters in Japan; and the participants' employment of a unique combination of verbal and embodied actions to transform the event of revision into a mutual decision. These findings suggest several important aspects of professionalization in beauty salons. Notably, the professionals' ability to harmonize talk and action is a special trait. Also, despite the fundamental regularities, the service-assessment sequence is frequently adapted to specific circumstances of each beauty salon that may vary across different services and cultures. Finally, the production of professional assessments and agreements are achieved by the participants' constant work on dramatization through the use of various communicative resources. The study is applicable not only to the field of cosmetology, but to a range of professional-client interactions where people evaluate the quality of service with their subjective perspectives, enhancing our understanding of negotiation-in-interaction in the workplace and what it means to professionalize communication in such situations. / text

<p>Advanced architectures for cluster-based services that have been recently proposed allow for service differentiation, server overload control and high utilization of resources. These systems, however, rely on centralized functions, which limit their ability to scale and to tolerate faults. In addition, they do not have built-in architectural support for automatic reconfiguration in case of failures or addition/removal of system components.</p><p>Recent research in peer-to-peer systems and distributed management has demonstrated the potential benefits of decentralized over centralized designs: a decentralized design can reduce the configuration complexity of a system and increase its scalability and fault tolerance.</p><p>This research focuses on introducing self-management capabilities into the design of cluster-based services. Its intended benefits are to make service platforms dynamically adapt to the needs of customers and to environment changes, while giving the service providers the capability to adjust operational policies at run-time.</p><p>We have developed a decentralized design that efficiently allocates resources among multiple services inside a server cluster. The design combines the advantages of both centralized and decentralized architectures. It allows associating a set of QoS objectives with each service. In case of overload or failures, the quality of service degrades in a controllable manner. We have evaluated the performance of our design through extensive simulations. The results have been compared with performance characteristics of ideal systems.</p>

Within the competitive marketing environment, companies are faced with many challenges to stay competitive. Companies are consistently trying to establish the longterm relationship with customers by satisfying them as much as possible. Since relationship marketing has highly-discussed concerns building the long-term relationship and improve customer satisfaction, the study aims to describe how different relationship marketing tactics affect customer satisfaction. According to previous scholars, four different major relationship marketing tactics were selected to investigate and described in the study, which are the quality of service, price perception, brand perception and value proposition. The authors developed a theoretical framework by reviewing previous works of literature to see how companies use relationship marketing tactics as a business strategy to develop customer satisfaction. The method of quantitative research was applied to this study and a online questionnaire was used to collect data. In results chapter, the authors tested descriptive analysis, reliability, validity, regression analysis by analyzing the empirical findings. There are three hypotheses accepted and one rejected. In the end of this paper, the authors analyzed and described the data in detail and revealed the effect of each relationship marketing tactics on customer satisfaction. Limitation of this study and further research are also presented.