Although the Automatically Switched Optical Networks (ASON) specifications strongly recommend a hierarchical network architecture for these networks, this is still an open issue. The hierarchical network concept involves several mechanisms mainly related with signalling and routing, such as the aggregation scheme, the dissemination process, the updating policy and the routing algorithms. The ex...

This paper deals with fuzzy cellular neural networks (FCNNs) with leakage delays and proportional delays. Applying the differential inequality strategy, fixed point theorem and almost periodic function principle, some sufficient criteria which ensure the existence and global attractivity of a unique almost periodic solution for fuzzy cellular neuralnetworks with leakage delays and p...

The paper describes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework for coordinated sensing and adaptive communication in embedded sensor networks. The technique enables distributed sensor nodes to adapt their sampling rates in response to changing event criticality and the availability of resources (energy) at each node. The relationship between energy consumption, sampling rates, and utility of coo...

There is a growing global market in healthcare and patients. And while there is a small body of evidence emerging around this phenomenon commonly known as medical tourism there remain significant unanswered policy and research questions which need to be addressed. We outline some of the key issues set against the six key disciplinary preoccupations of the journal: epidemiology, health economics...

The instrumental use of social networks has become a central tenet of international health policy and advocacy since the Millennium project. In asking, 'How to facilitate social contagion?', Karl Blanchet of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine therefore reflects not only on the recent success, but also hints to growing challenges; the tactics of partnerships, alliances and platfo...

in this commentary, we endorse concerns about the health impact of the trans-pacific partnership (tpp), paying particular attention to its mechanisms for investor state dispute settlement. we then describe the different, judgeled approach being advocated by the european commission team negotiating the trans-atlantic trade and investment partnership, arguing that, while not perfect, it offers si...

in this commentary, i argue that beyond a sophisticated supportive architecture to facilitate implementation of actions on the social determinants of health (sdoh) and health inequities, the health in all policies (hiap) project faces two main barriers: lack of awareness within policy networks on the social determinants of population health, and a tendency of health actors to neglect investing ...

Efforts of this paper focus on the issues about management and throughput of firewalls (or screening routers) applied in transit networks. On the one hand, manual configuration of large amount of firewalls distributed in many access points can not meet the global security requirements in the open and dynamic environment. On the other hand, the ordinal lookup of filtering rules in each individua...