We are witnessing an ever-increasing thrust toward the era of multimedia information networks, largely spurred by the U.S. Government's proposal for the National Information Infrastructure in the fall of 1993. While more people are subscribing to the services of narrowband ISDN, the implementation of broadband ISDN by means of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has accelerated since the formation of the ATM Forum in 1993. In the meantime, frame relay may prevail for inter-LAN connections. In the "upper layer" of the network, commercial use of Internet is rapidly emerging. To ensure the successful development of technology, it is vital to use a judicious approach in assessing the architecture and performance of the systems that implement the technology. It is this spirit that underlies the present conference, which is intended to provide an international forum for the presentation of recent research results in the area of local and metropolitan communication systems. This conference has two sets of predecessors. It is the third in a series of international conferences on Local and Metropolitan Communication Systems -LAN & MAN; the first was held in Toulouse in 1986 and the second in Palma de Mallorca in 1991. It is also the fourth in a triennial series organized by Kyoto University and others on the performance of communication-related systems; the previous ones were held in Tokyo (1985) and Kyoto (1988, 1991).

There are many exciting trends and developments in the communications industry, several of which are related to advances in fast packet switching, multi media services, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and high-speed protocols. It seems fair to say that the face of networking has been rapidly changing and the distinction between LANs, MANs, and WANs is becoming more and more blurred. It is commonly believed in the industry that ATM represents the next generation in networking. The adoption of ATM standards by the research and development community as a unifying technology for communications that scales from local to wide area has been met with great enthusiasm from the business community and end users. Reflecting these trends, the technical program of the First International Conference on LAN Interconnection consists of papers addressing a wide range of technical challenges and state of the art reviews. We are fortunate to have assembled a strong program committee, expert speakers, and panelists. We would like to thank Professor Schwartz for his keynote speech. We would like to thank Professor Yannis Viniotis and his students for the preparation of the index. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of Dr. Jon Fjeld, Mr. Rick McGee, and Mr. David Witt, all of IBM-Research Triangle Park. We also would like to thank Ms. Mary Safford, our editor, and Mr. John Matzka, both at Plenum Press, for the publication of the proceedings.

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.

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.

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.

Adaptive techniques play a key role in modern wireless communication systems. The concept of adaptation is emphasized in the Adaptation in Wireless Communications Series through a unified framework across all layers of the wireless protocol stack ranging from the physical layer to the application layer, and from cellular systems to next-generation wireless networks. Adaptation and Cross Layer Design in Wireless Networks is devoted to adaptation in the data link layer, network layer, and application layer. The book presents state-of-the-art adaptation techniques and methodologies, including cross-layer adaptation, joint signal processing, coding and networking, selfishness in mobile ad hoc networks, cooperative and opportunistic protocols, adaptation techniques for multimedia support, self –organizing routing, and tunable security services. It presents several new theoretical paradigms and analytical findings which are supported with various simulation and experimental results. Adaptation in wireless communications is needed in order to achieve high capacity and ubiquitous communications. The current trend in wireless communication systems is to make adaptation dependent upon the state of the relevant parameters in all layers of the system. Focusing on simplified cross layer design approaches, this volume describes advanced techniques such as adaptive resource management, adaptive modulation and coding, 4G communications, QoS, diversity combining, and energy and mobility aware MAC protocols. The first volume in the series, Adaptive Signal Processing in Wireless Communications (cat no.46012) covers adaptive signal processing at the physical layer.