While the Quality of Service (QoS) offered to users may be enhanced through innovative protocols and new technologies, future trends should take into account the efficiency of resource allocation and network/terminal cooperation as well. Game theory techniques have widely been applied to various engineering design problems in which the action of one component has impact on (and perhaps conflict...

The prevailing wisdom in web design literature cautions against the use of distracting website features; such as animated banners, pop-ups and floating advertisements, as they have the potential to cause annoyance and disrupt the process of pre-purchase evaluation in the context of online shopping. Recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology however, have suggested that a systematic an...

While the layered OSI model for networks provides a very clean conceptual framework for network design, certain applications are not completely indifferent to what happens at the lower layers. This is particularly true for multimedia and other real–time applications, which usually have stringent constraints on network performance in order to deliver an acceptable Quality of Experience (QoE) to ...

Despite the accelerated pace at which progress in wireless technologies occurs, it is not uncommon to observe that some Mobile Operators (MOs) do not upgrade their mobile services, while their competitors adopt the newest technological standards. This paper proposes an explanation for this apparent paradox by means of a formal theoretical model that acknowledges demand heterogeneity in a qualit...

............................................................................................................vii

This paper addresses the problem of software quality information and the creation of an organizational memory founded on it. We focus on aspects such as how to organize the organizational memory, how to apply a collaborative multiview approach to it, and how to capture and use it in software design and inspection. The presented solution is based on the integrative theories of human knowledge cr...

This paper describes a proposal of a systemic model for applying QFD, designed to reduce its application difficulties. This model is constructed based on Axiomatic Design (AD). The paper presents the steps of this on-going research project, namely: a literature analysis, a field research to collect empirical data, and the application of AD. The results from those steps made possible to establis...

This article is about student engagement and in particular the engagement of students in internal institutional quality assurance processes in the UK. It discusses the extent to which the introduction of more explicit internal and external quality assurance processes militate against the notion of the student as a part of a ‘cohesive learning community’ in favour of the notion of the student as...

WS-Agreement is a well-established and widely adopted protocol that helps service providers and consumers to agree on constraints under which a service is made available. However, the original protocol is limited to a simple interaction pattern for establishing agreements: the requester suggests the Quality of Service (QoS) details, the responder either accepts or declines. This is no longer su...

This paper presents a new approach for filter design based on stochastic distances and tests between distributions. A window is defined around each pixel, overlapping samples are compared and only those which pass a goodnessof-fit test are used to compute the filtered value. The technique is applied to intensity SAR data with homogeneous regions using the Gamma model. The proposal is compared w...