Containing research on recent technological and scientific developments associated with the management of surface and sub-surface water, this book consists of papers presented at the Seventh International Conference on Water Resources Management,. The biennial conference, first held in 1991, is one of several water-related conferences organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology. We have reached a point where water has become quite a precious resource, with communities around the world struggling to ensure adequate supply to their people. The research shared in this volume is an important contribution to the body of literature on the topic.The research covers: Water management and planning; The right to water and sanitation; Waste water treatment and re-use; Water markets, policies and contracts; Climate change; Irrigation; Urban water management; Hydraulic engineering; Water quality; Pollution contaminants and control; River basin management; Flood risk; Wetlands; Regional and geo-politics of water; Water resources and economics; Government and regulations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013 in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2013). The 4 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information sharing and data/text mining; terrorism informatics; network-based data analytics; and information access and security.

Focusing on the nuts and bolts of wireless network access for computers on board vehicles, this volume shows how in-car computerization now does much more than merely act as a glorified map-reader. Wireless communication is transforming road travel in ways previously undreamt of, allowing vehicles to “talk” to a wider network and monitor road conditions, potential delays and traffic congestion, all automatically. Toll payments can be made without opening the driver’s window on a cold day, while vehicles might themselves take active steps to avoid collisions. It is the connection between on-board computers and wireless access points, ubiquitous in most cities now, that is a key area of research. Moving vehicles transfer their communications to new points as they progress, and this causes delays, known as “handover latency”. In this book, new stochastic models are developed to map the disruption when connecting to 802.11 WLAN points. It details the application of stochastic tools to analyzing communication networks, as well as previous literature on handover latency and relevant mathematical modeling. Finally, it presents a scheme for monitoring traffic congestion using WLAN connectivity. This volume will be a useful addition to the libraries both of wireless communication students and those studying probability theory.

This book presents classical Markov Decision Processes (MDP) for real-life applications and optimization. MDP allows users to develop and formally support approximate and simple decision rules, and this book showcases state-of-the-art applications in which MDP was key to the solution approach. The book is divided into six parts. Part 1 is devoted to the state-of-the-art theoretical foundation of MDP, including approximate methods such as policy improvement, successive approximation and infinite state spaces as well as an instructive chapter on Approximate Dynamic Programming. It then continues with five parts of specific and non-exhaustive application areas. Part 2 covers MDP healthcare applications, which includes different screening procedures, appointment scheduling, ambulance scheduling and blood management. Part 3 explores MDP modeling within transportation. This ranges from public to private transportation, from airports and traffic lights to car parking or charging your electric car . Part 4 contains three chapters that illustrates the structure of approximate policies for production or manufacturing structures. In Part 5, communications is highlighted as an important application area for MDP. It includes Gittins indices, down-to-earth call centers and wireless sensor networks. Finally Part 6 is dedicated to financial modeling, offering an instructive review to account for financial portfolios and derivatives under proportional transactional costs. The MDP applications in this book illustrate a variety of both standard and non-standard aspects of MDP modeling and its practical use. This book should appeal to readers for practitioning, academic research and educational purposes, with a background in, among others, operations research, mathematics, computer science, and industrial engineering.

Learn all you need to know about wireless sensor networks! Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks provides a thorough description of the nuts and bolts of wireless sensor networks. The authors give an overview of the state-of-the-art, putting all the individual solutions into perspective with one and other. Numerous practical examples, case studies and illustrations demonstrate the theory, techniques and results presented. The clear chapter structure, listing learning objectives, outline and summarizing key points, help guide the reader expertly through the material. Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks: Covers architecture and communications protocols in detail with practical implementation examples and case studies. Provides an understanding of mutual relationships and dependencies between different protocols and architectural decisions. Offers an in-depth investigation of relevant protocol mechanisms. Shows which protocols are suitable for which tasks within a wireless sensor network and in which circumstances they perform efficiently. Features an extensive website with the bibliography, PowerPoint slides, additional exercises and worked solutions. This text provides academic researchers, graduate students in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering, as well as practitioners in industry and research engineers with an understanding of the specific design challenges and solutions for wireless sensor networks. Check out www.wiley.com/go/wsn for accompanying course material! "I am deeply impressed by the book of Karl & Willig. It is by far the most complete source for wireless sensor networks...The book covers almost all topics related to sensor networks, gives an amazing number of references, and, thus, is the perfect source for students, teachers, and researchers. Throughout the book the reader will find high quality text, figures, formulas, comparisons etc. - all you need for a sound basis to start sensor network research." Prof. Jochen Schiller, Institute of Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin

This book reports on a novel concept of mechanism transitions for the design of highly scalable and adaptive publish/subscribe systems. First, it introduces relevant mechanisms for location-based filtering and locality-aware dissemination of events based on a thorough review of the state-of-the-art. This is followed by a detailed description of the design of a transition-enabled publish/subscribe system that enables seamless switching between mechanisms during runtime. Lastly, the proposed concepts are evaluated within the challenging context of location-based mobile applications. The book assesses in depth the performance and cost of transition execution, highlighting the impact of the proposed state transfer mechanism and the potential of coexisting transition-enabled mechanisms.

With the ubiquitous diffusion of the IoT, Cloud Computing, 5G and other evolved wireless technologies into our daily lives, the world will see the Internet of the future expand ever more quickly. Driving the progress of communications and connectivity are mobile and wireless technologies, including traditional WLANs technologies and low, ultra-power, short and long-range technologies. These technologies facilitate the communication among the growing number of connected devices, leading to the generation of huge volumes of data. Processing and analysis of such "big data" brings about many opportunities, as well as many challenges, such as those relating to efficient power consumptions, security, privacy, management, and quality of service. This book is about the technologies, opportunities and challenges that can drive and shape the networks of the future. Written by established international researchers and experts, Networks of the Future answers fundamental and pressing research challenges in the field, including architectural shifts, concepts, mitigation solutions and techniques, and key technologies in the areas of networking. The book starts with a discussion on Cognitive Radio (CR) technologies as promising solutions for improving spectrum utilization, and also highlights the advances in CR spectrum sensing techniques and resource management methods. The second part of the book presents the latest developments and research in the areas of 5G technologies and Software Defined Networks (SDN). Solutions to the most pressing challenges facing the adoption of 5G technologies are also covered, and the new paradigm known as Fog Computing is examined in the context of 5G networks. The focus next shifts to efficient solutions for future heterogeneous networks. It consists of a collection of chapters that discuss self-healing solutions, dealing with Network Virtualization, QoS in heterogeneous networks, and energy efficient techniques for Passive Optical Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks. Finally, the areas of IoT and Big Data are discussed, including the latest developments and future perspectives of Big Data and the IoT paradigms.