Availability Of Communication Channels Research Articles

Availability of Services in Wireless Sensor Network with Aerial Base Station Placement

Internet of Things technologies use many sensors combined with wireless networks for cyber-physical systems in various applications. Mobility is an essential characteristic for many objects that use sensors. In mobile sensor networks, the availability of communication channels is crucial, especially for mission-critical applications. This article presents models for analyzing the availability of sensor services in a wireless network with aerial base station placement (ABSP), considering the real conditions for using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The studied system uses a UAV-assisted mobile edge computing architecture, including ABSP and a ground station for restoring the energy capacity of the UAVs, to maintain the availability of interaction with the sensors. The architecture includes a fleet of additional replacement UAVs to ensure continuous communication coverage for the sensor network during the charging period of the air-based station UAVs. Analytical expressions were obtained to determine the availability of sensor services in the system studied.

Joint UAV Placement and Data Delivery in Aerial Inspection Under Uncertainties

The advancements in Internet-connected drones and edge computing raise the possibility of an on-the-fly inspection service that can instantly report the results. Inspection of sites using a drone fleet requires planning to meet situational requirements while minimizing operational costs under uncertainties of inspection requests, the urgency of reports, and the availability of communication channels. In this work, with the restriction on drone flying time, we decompose the planning into two phases: i) pre-computing groups of sites and ii) three-stage stochastic programming. The former phase generates feasible groups of sites, each of which is served by a drone, and pre-computes the minimum-cost flying path for each group. The latter phase, given the feasible groups, jointly optimizes drone placement and data delivery under the uncertainties. The two-phase approach allows the planning to scale up to a practical situation. The performance evaluations show that the overall cost can be saved even if uncertainties exist, and the proposed approach significantly outperforms other methods, which do not consider the uncertainties. For a larger problem size, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to trade a loss in the optimality of 1:05-1:09 times the cost with 3:67-483:97 times speed-up in computation time.

The Digital Transformation of the Retail Electricity Market in Spain

The deregulation of the electricity markets in the European Union and the transformation caused by digital technologies and customer-centric strategies have altered the industry ecosystem, forcing companies to adapt to the new scenario. This research study aims to give a global overview of the digital transformation and channel integration of free-market electricity retailers in Spain from a consumer’s perspective. The analysis includes all free-market electricity retailers that operate at the national scale, explores the level of digital transformation and channel integration of these companies based on a structured set of indicators, and measures them using the mystery shopper technique. The results show important differences between leading retailers and the rest of companies, evidence an important lag of the sector when compared to other retail markets and an overall lack of multichannel and omnichannel strategies, show a strong effort of retailers in online billing and self-service customer data management, and reveal shortcomings in the availability of communication channels with customers.

Regional Landscape of Bolivian Economic Growth

Bolivia is a wide surface country, with more than one million of squared kilometers and diverse ecological ecosystems. Besides its landlockedness, Bolivian economic activity has been shaped by the diverse geographic characteristics mainly distance and the availability of communication channels. In this paper I use a novel regional database of regional economic activity to analyze in what extent the spatial dimension has influenced medium term economic growth of the nine regions during the past 45 years. Contrary to standard approach based on contiguity or geographical distance to introduce spatial issues in the analysis, I use an exponential decay approach built on “true distance” jointly a gravity model. Then, I found as significant the inclusion of spatial consideration in the estimation of static and dynamic balanced panel data models, where I found how the process of regional economic growth has been slightly influenced by this spatial feature implying the still low degree of integration among Bolivian regions.

Emergence of Differing Electronic Communication Norms Within Partially Distributed Teams

Modern organizations often consist of teams in which some people are collocated and some are remote. These teams are in-between being entirely virtual to entirely face-to-face and are referred to as partially distributed teams. Partially distributed teams function and operate in two different media environments, varying in availability of communication channels. These media environments may encourage different communication patterns, widening a gap produced by distance. In two laboratory studies we demonstrate that different electronic communication norms (ECNs) emerge among members of the same team based on their media environments. Most of the norms regarding use of electronic communication persisted even when media environment was changed. This difference in ECNs might serve as an additional faultline, causing an additional rift within distributed teams.

A Report on Some Organizational Experiments

An organizational analog is constructed in the form of an operational game to be used for testing hypotheses concerning the effect of organizational structure on the efficiency of organizational performance. The ultimate objective is to develop mathematical theory, which makes this relation explicit. Several experiments using the game are described where the effect of such variables as the presence or absence of an executive, the availability of communication channels, and the cooperativeness or competitiveness of payoffs are tested. The work is preliminary, but holds promise of productive use of gaming in theory construction.