Agreement Protocol Research Articles

Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks: An Updated Overview

Trademarks play a very important role in a Global Marketplace. An international registration is a valuable property right. Trademark law has undergone profound changes, both multilaterally and regionally. The Paris Union which is the beginning of the international trademark system is extended by a special union, namely, the Madrid Agreement. Then, the Madrid Protocol expedited the international filing system. This article reviews the issues such as Madrid Agreement, Madrid Protocol, Madrid System, and the relationship between Madrid Agreement and Madrid Protocol. It also gives an updated introduction of the recent development and actual operation of this international trademark registration system.

The time-triggered architecture

The time-triggered architecture (TTA) provides a computing infrastructure for the design and implementation of dependable distributed embedded systems. A large real-time application is decomposed into nearly autonomous clusters and nodes, and a fault-tolerant global time base of known precision is generated at every node. In the TTA, this global time is used to precisely specify the interfaces among the nodes, to simplify the communication and agreement protocols, to perform prompt error detection, and to guarantee the timeliness of real-time applications. The TTA supports a two-phased design methodology, architecture design, and component design. During the architecture design phase, the interactions among the distributed components and the interfaces of the components are fully specified in the value domain and in the temporal domain. In the succeeding component implementation phase, the components are built, taking these interface specifications as constraints. This two-phased design methodology is a prerequisite for the composability of applications implemented in the TTA and for the reuse of prevalidated components within the TTA. This paper presents the architecture model of the TTA, explains the design rationale, discusses the time-triggered communication protocols TTP/C and TTP/A, and illustrates how transparent fault tolerance can be implemented in the TTA.

Some Migration Dynamics Specific to Southern Europe: South‐North and East‐West Axis

This article examines the magnitude and determinants of migration from east to west (Europe) following the collapse of communism, and from south (Africa) to north (Europe).Special attention is given to assessing numbers and characteristics (including illegal) of the flows, and also to reasons for and success of bilateral agreements and cooperative projects by the governments of Italy and Spain designed to check and control the flows.Notwithstanding tighter controls on visas for Third World nationals, migration to western Europe does not seem to have abated. In Italy, illegal migration from the east (Albania in particular) is connected, directly or indirectly, with the criminal underworld.The inventory of legal texts and agreement protocols between Spain and Morocco designed to resolve many issues relating to migration, reflect long‐standing relations between the two countries. Political and economic relations between Italy and Albania, on the other hand, have developed only within the framework of recent policies.While the presence of Moroccans in Spain and Albanians in Italy is not yet demographically significant, the authors predict that, in the absence of further appropriate political and economic measures, numbers will increase.

Security analysis of the generalized key agreement and password authentication protocol

We show that the enhanced version of the generalized key agreement and password authentication protocol, proposed by Kwon and Song (see IEICE Trans. Commun., vol.E83-B, no.9, p.2044-50, Sept. 2000), is insecure against off-line password guessing attacks.

Simulative performance analysis of gossip failure detection for scalable distributed systems

Three protocols for gossip-based failure detection services in large-scale heterogeneous clusters are analyzed and compared. The basic gossip protocol provides a means by which failures can be detected in large distributed systems in an asynchronous manner without the limits associated with reliable multicasting for group communications. The hierarchical protocol leverages the underlying network topology to achieve faster failure detection. In addition to studying the effectiveness and efficiency of these two agreement protocols, we propose a third protocol that extends the hierarchical approach by piggybacking gossip information on application-generated messages. The protocols are simulated and evaluated with a fault-injection model for scalable distributed systems comprised of clusters of workstations connected by high-performance networks, such as the CPlant system at Sandia National Laboratories. The model supports permanent and transient node and link failures, with rates specified at simulation time, for processors functioning in a fail-silent fashion. Through high-fidelity, CAD-based modeling and simulation, we demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach in terms of agreement time, number of gossips, and overall scalability.