Expenditure on food is a major item of the budget of British households. For low income households it may be the single largest expenditure category. It follows from this that there are major welfare implications in the placement of the retail stores from which foodstuffs may be bought. This issue has been a topic of debate ever since the grocery retail system began to restructure into larger outlets. Food retailing in Britain is highly competitive and the major chains have an excellent record of supplying food on low profit margins per item. This in itself, however, forces them to seek other ways of reducing overheads. Accordingly, there are sound economic reasons why grocery retailers must seek low-cost locations that are accessible to the more mobile sectors of the community. The advent of the French-style hypermarket drew attention to the possibility that such a revision of the system of retailing might offer low prices but at the cost of making stores inaccessible to the less mobile low income groups who most need those low prices. It is to this vital issue that this thesis addresses itself. Empirical analysis is undertaken in South Hampshire in order to compare a hypermarket with a superstore. The latter type of store offers similar facilities of large scale grocery shopping but in a more accessible location. Three separate types of analysis, each within the positivist/ behaviouralist tradition proposed by Johnston, are attempted in order to draw out the welfare implications of these contrasted store types. Analyses are undertaken at each of the stores, in the hinterland of the stores and among higher-income and lower-income residents of the area. The conclusions are that the superstore is td be favoured on welfare grounds. At the same time, it is recognised that such stores develop within the overall framework of control offered by the British Planning System. Accordingly, the 'Managerialist' theories of Pahl are drawn upon in order to place the research in a wider context. This makes it possible to extend the applicability of the findings beyond the immediate research area. Observations are made on possible planning strategies to maximise the likelihood that superstores, rather than hypermarkets, will be built in the future.

Hybrid Wireless Networks (HWNs) are composite networks comprises of different technologies, possibly with overlapping coverage. Users with multimode terminals in HWNs are able to initiate connectivity that best suits their attributes and the requirements of their applications. There are many complexities in hybrid wireless networks due to changing data rates, frequency of operation, resource availability, QoS and also, complexities in terms of mobility management across different technologies. A superstore is a very large retail store that serves as a one-stop shopping destination by offering a wide variety of goods that range from groceries to appliances. It provide all types services such as banking, photo center, catering, etc. The good examples of superstores are: Tesco (hypermarkets, United Kingdom), Carrefour(hypermarkets, France), etc. Generally, the mobile customer communicates with superstore server using a transaction. A transaction corresponds to a finite number of interactive processes between the customer and superstore server. A few superstore transactions, examples are, product browsing, Technical details inquiry, Financial transactions, billing, etc. This thesis aims to design and develop the following schemes to solve some of the above indicated problems of a hybrid wireless superstore network: 1 Transaction based bandwidth management. 2 Transaction-based resource management. 3 Transaction-based Quality of Service management. 4. Transactions-based topology management. We, herewith, present these developed schemes, the simulation carried out and results obtained, in brief. Transaction-based bandwidth management The designed Transaction-Based Bandwidth Management Scheme (TB-BMS) operates at application-level and intelligently allocates the bandwidth by monitoring the profit oriented sensitivity variations in the transactions, which are linked with various profit profiles created over type, time, and history of transactions. The scheme mainly consists of transaction classifier, bandwidth determination and transactions scheduling modules. We have deployed these scheme over a downlink of HWNs, since the uplink caries simple quires from customers to superstore server. The scheme uses transaction scheduling algorithm, which decides how to schedule an outgoing transaction based on its priority with efficient use of available BW. As we observe, not all superstore transactions can have the same profit sensitive information, data size and operation type. Therefore, we classify the superstore transactions into four levels based on profit, data size, operation type and the degree of severity of information that they are handling. The aim of transaction classification module is to find the transaction sensitivity level(TSL) for a given transaction. The bandwidth determination module estimates bandwidth requirement for each of the transactions. The transactions scheduling module schedules the transactions based on availability of bandwidth as per the TSL of the transaction. The scheme schedules the highest priority transactions first, keeping the lowest priority transaction pending. If all the highest priority transactions are over, then it continues with next priority level transactions, and so on, in every slot. We have simulated the hybrid wireless superstore network environment with WiFi and GSM technologies. We simulated four TSL levels with different bandwidth. The simulation under consideration uses different transactions with different bandwidth requirements. The performance results describe that the proposed scheme considerably improves the bandwidth utilization by reducing transaction blocking and accommodating more essential transactions at the peak time of the business. Transaction-based resource management In the next work, we have proposed the transaction-based resource management scheme (TB-RMS) to allocate the required resources among the various customer services based on priority of transactions. The scheme mainly consists of transaction classifier, resource estimation and transactions scheduling modules. This scheme also uses a downlink transaction scheduling algorithm, which decides how to schedule an outgoing transaction based on its priority with efficient use of available resources. The transaction-based resource management is similar to that of TB-BMS scheme, except that the scheme estimates the resources like buffer, bandwidth, processing time for each of transaction rather than bandwidth. The performance results indicate that the proposed TB-RMS scheme considerably improves the resource utilization by reducing transaction blocking and accommodating more essential transactions at the peak time. Transaction-based Quality of Service management In the third segment, we have proposed a police-based transaction-aware QoS management architecture for the downlink QoS management. We derive a policy for the estimation of QoS parameters, like, delay, jitter, bandwidth, transaction loss for every transaction before scheduling on the downlink. We use Policy-based Transaction QoS Management(PTQM) to achieve the transaction based QoS management. Policies are rules that govern a transaction behavior, usually implemented in the form of if(condition) then(action) policies. The QoS management scheme is fully centralized, and is based on the ideas of client-server interaction. Each mobile terminal is connected to a server via WiFi or GSM. The master policy controller (MPDF) connects to the policy controller of the WiFi network (WPDF)and the GSM policy controller(PDF). We have considered the simulation environment similar to earlier schemes. The results shows that the policy-based transaction QoS management is improves performance and utilizes network resources efficiently at the peak time of the superstore business. Transactions-Aware Topology Management(TATM) Finally, we have proposed a topology management scheme to the superstore hybrid wireless networks. A wireless topology management that manages the activities and features of a wireless network connection. It may control the process of selecting an available access points, authentication and associating to it and setting up other parameters of the wireless connection. The proposed topology management scheme consists of the transaction classifier, resource estimation module, network availability and status module and transaction-aware topology management module. The TATM scheme is to select the best network among available networks to provide transaction response(or execution). We have simulated hybrid wireless superstore network with five WiFi and two GSM technologies. The performance results indicate that the transaction-based topology management scheme utilizes the available resources efficiently and distributed transaction loads evenly in both WiFi and GSM networks based on the capacity.

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