Verification of statements about story worlds that deviate from normal conceptions of time: what is true about Einstein's Dreams?

College students read chapters from a novel written by Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) and later provided verification judgments on the truth/falsity of test statements. Each chapter described a different fictional village that incorporated assumptions about time that deviate from our normal TIME schema, e.g., citizens knowing exactly when the world will end, time flowing backward instead of forward. These novel assumptions about time provided interesting insights about life and reality. In two experiments, we examined whether readers could accurately incorporate these novel assumptions about time in the fictional story worlds, as manifested in the verification judgments for statements after story comprehension. The test statements included verbatim typical, verbatim atypical, inference typical, and inference atypical information from the perspective of mundane reality that meshes with a normal TIME schema. Verification ratings were collected on a 6-point scale in Experiment 1, whereas Experiment 2 used a signal-response technique in which binary true/false decisions were extracted at-.5, 1.5, 3.5, 5.5, and 10.0 s. The college students were measured on literary expertise, reading skill, working memory span, and reading time. Readers with comparatively high literary expertise showed truth discrimination scores that were compatible with a schema copy plus tag model, which assumes that readers are good at detecting and remembering atypical verbatim information; this model predicts better (and faster) truth discrimination for verbatim atypical statements than for verbatim typical statements. In contrast, fast readers with comparatively low literary expertise were compatible with a filtering model; this model predicts that readers gloss over (or suppress) atypical verbatim information and show advantages for verbatim typical information. All groups of readers had trouble inferentially propagating the novel assumptions about time in a fictional story world, but the slower readers were more accurate in their verification of the atypical inferences. A construction-integration model could explain the interactions among literary expertise, reading time, and the typicality of test statements.     

QoS support for an all IP system beyond 3G

Mobile radio systems beyond the third generation will evolve into all-IP systems, integrating Internet and mobile system advantages. The BRAIN project is developing a system architecture which combines local coverage broadband radio access systems based on HIPERLAN/2 with several wider-coverage mobile radio systems, enabling full coverage of seamless IP-based services for users in hot spot areas and on the move. End-to-end QoS provision is one of the major challenges in the design of such a system and must be supported by the application, network, and wireless access layers. This article proposes a QoS system architecture, including the terminal architecture, the IP-based access network, and the main characteristics of the enhancements to the air interface based on HIPERLAN/2 focusing on its wireless QoS support     

Fair optimization of mesh‐connected WLAN hotspots

In Wireless mesh networks mesh access points (MAPs) forward traffic wirelessly towards users or Internet gateways. A user device usually connects to the MAP with the strongest signal, as such MAP should guarantee the best quality of service. However, this connection policy may lead to: (i) unfairness towards users that are distant from gateways; (ii) uneven distribution of users to MAPs; and (iii) inefficient use of network paths. We present a new model and solution approach to the problem of assigning users to MAPs and routing the data within the mesh network with the objective of providing max–min fair throughput. The problem is formulated as a mixed‐integer linear programming problem (MILP). Because of the inherent complexity of the problem, real size instances cannot be solved to optimality within the time limits for online optimization. Therefore, we propose an original heuristic solution algorithm for the resulting MILP. Both numerical comparisons and network simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. For random networks, the heuristic achieves 98% of the optimal solution. Network simulations show that in medium‐sized networks, the number of users with at least 1Mbit/s minimum end‐to‐end rate increases by 550% when compared with the classical signal‐strength based association. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

End-to-end quality-of-service coordination for mobile multimedia applications

Transmitting real-time multimedia streams over heterogeneous mobile networks is a challenging task. Variation in network and system conditions can dramatically affect application performance. When providing end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) multiple system facets should be coordinated: orchestration of local and peer resources, reservation of network resources, adaptation of multimedia streams, etc. This paper presents an end-to-end negotiation protocol (E2ENP) for negotiating and coordinating QoS on an end-to-end basis both at application and network layer. Based on a flexible extensible markup language (XML) model and extending SDPng concepts, the protocol enables the negotiation of system capabilities and allows provider-services to effectively influence the negotiation process. The aim of the E2ENP design is to optimize the efficiency of multimedia call setup and reduce the time for QoS renegotiations, whenever vertical handovers or spontaneous network reconfigurations occur. The basic protocol is presented, together with implementation and measurement results, stemming from several studies on current and future third-generation/fourth-generation scenarios.     

A software-defined networking approach for handover management with real-time video in WLANs

Railway Engineering Science - To achieve high performance and reliability in video streaming over wireless local area networks (WLANs), one must jointly consider both optimized association to...