MPEG video decoding algorithm has been embedded into many consumer electronic products. In this paper, we demonstrate that the completion ratio (CR) does not represent well the quality of presentation (QoP) of MPEG video. We then propose a new QoP metric, which 1) is based on frame completion ratio but 2) differentiates firm and soft deadlines and also 3) considers the frame dependency. We show...

Iron chelation therapy (ICT) has been applied for the patients with iron overload-associated liver dysfunction since it is one of the causes of death in patients with intractable hematological diseases requiring multiple red blood cell transfusions. Recently, deferasirox (DSX), a novel, once-daily oral iron chelator, was demonstrated to have similar efficacy to the conventional continuous infus...

This paper introduces a deterministic fluid model that approximates the many-server Gt/GI/st + GI queueing model, and determines the time-dependent performance functions. The fluid model has time-varying arrival rate and service capacity, abandonment from queue, and non-exponential service and patience distributions. Two key assumptions are that: (i) the system alternates between overloaded and...

Recently, mobile networks have been overloaded with a considerable amount of data traffic. The current paper proposes a management service for mobile environments, using policies and quality metrics, which ensure a better usage of network resources with a more fine-grained management based on flows with different classes of service and transmission rates. This management of flows is supported t...

BACKGROUND: The presence of a hypervascular nodule in a patient with cirrhosis is highly suggestive of a hepatocellular carcinoma. CASE PRESENTATION: A 55 year old man with idiopathic refractory anaemia was addressed for the cure of a recently appeared 3.3 cm hypervascular liver nodule. The nodule was not visible on the resected fresh specimen, but a paler zone was seen after formalin fixation....

We present two strategies to balance the load in a system with multiple virtual machines (VMs) through automated live migration. When the push strategy is used, overloaded hosts try to migrate workload to less loaded nodes. On the other hand, when the pull strategy is employed, the light-loaded hosts take the initiative to offload overloaded nodes. The performance of the proposed strategies was...

To support hundreds of thousands of players in massively multiplayer online games, a distributed client-server architecture is widely used in which multiple servers are deployed and each server handles a partition of the virtual world. Because of the unpredictable movements and interactions of avatars, the concentration of avatars in some regions of the virtual world may cause some servers be o...

Consider a single server queueing system with several classes of customers, each having its own renewal input process and its own general service times distribution. Upon completing service, customers may leave, or reenter the queue, possibly as customers of a different class. The server is operating under the egalitarian or the discriminatory processor sharing discipline. In this paper, we con...

Resource allocation is one of the principal stages of relational query processing in data grid systems. Static allocation methods allocate nodes to relational operations during query compilation. Existing heuristics did not take into account the multi-queries environment, where some nodes may become overloaded because they are allocated to too many concurrent queries. Dynamic resource allocatio...

One of the most novel features in the functional programming language Haskell is the system of type classes used to support a combination of overloading and polymorphism. Current implementations of type class overloading are based on the use of dictionary values, passed as extra parameters to overloaded functions. Unfortunately, this can have a significant effect on run-time performance, for ex...