This paper looks at the problem of endowment assurances which do not meet their targets to repay residential mortgages. Through the analysis of the present value of payments under different inflation and interest-rate regimes, we conclude that the perceived problems with endowment policies may simply be a manifestation of "money illusion". Nevertheless, there could frictional problems and other...

Most existing WLAN access mechanisms cannot provide QoS assurances. Even those that are QoS aware can only provide relative service differentiation. Based on EY-NPMA, the HIPERLAN Medium Access Control algorithm, we propose a dynamic priority medium access scheme to provide time-bounded services. By approximating an ideal Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduler, the proposed scheme can offer de...

In this paper we propose the use of statistical QoS guarantees for transmission over the wireless channel. Here, instead of QoS assurances, we propose to guarantee the percentage of time the QoS requirements are satisfied. We present an associated scheduling algorithm for the opportunistic multiple access system. We compare the proposed scheduler with popular schedulers from the literature. We ...

Unison remains uncertain about the future of primary care, despite receiving further assurances from health secretary Patricia Hewitt last week.

The goal of this paper is to examine the gains of partial upgrades to existing FIFO networks, to support delay assurances. Specifically, we try to find the number of hops of FIFO multiplexing after which a latency target is violated. We first examine the effect of multiplexing two flows through successive FIFO schedulers, and for a simple scenario where cross-traffic is assumed to be absent, we...