Summary
Technologically enriched communication environments are changing many aspects of the human social fabric including friendship, neighborhood, education, and business. As the virtual network grows, it will affect our sense of sociability, our understanding of world affairs, and our engagement in the global economy.
In the past, point-to-point connectivity of the mail system and the telephone allowed us to reach across a distributed social landscape to specifically selected people and sites. At the same time, one-way newspapers and broadcast media (radio and television) created a power structure based on the opinions of a few. As we enter the brave new world of the World Wide Web, the old paradigms of control break down. No longer is the creation and distribution of information restricted to large firms, governments, academics or wealthy entrepreneurs. Individuals are able to receive and to publish what they want, when they want, where they want, at a reasonable cost.
As the network becomes smarter, the distributed community of audience will be formed and reformed based on meta-data which can convey interest of the consumer and the economics of efficient entrepreneurial effort to the system. Now the system becomes an active player and the very concept of information becomes nebulous. By information do we mean story content, or do we mean meta-information collected by the system? Can the system decide whether story content should be presented in the background or in the foreground plane of consciousness? Who owns the meta-data and how can we be sure that it will be used on our behalf? Finally, as the base of power shifts from individuals to the collective systemic network activity, how will we value human individuality and artistic expression?
Summary
The paper deals with the new telecommunication networks, the
reasons for changes and the options with which telecommunications
are faced today. The new generation network architecture is
discussed and two evolution case studies are presented, as well
as the new role of powerful applications in the future
development of networks. Special attention is paid to software
research and development supporting this “new telecoms
world”.
Summary
Multicast networking is poised to play a prominent role in the future deployment of multimedia applications. Multimedia applications are usually resource intensive, have stringent quality of service requirements, and in many cases involve large multicast groups. Multicasting enables these applications to scale to a large number of users without overloading the network and server resources. This paper focuses on developing low-cost, delay-bounded multicast trees. A new heuristic is proposed which decouples the cost optimization from bounding the delay by first building a low-cost tree and then handling any delay violations that may occur in the tree. The heuristic incrementally builds low-cost multicast trees using the K-shortest-path algorithm. The heuristic, referred to as K-shortest-path based, delay-conStrained, Low-cost, Inexpensive, Multicasting (K-SLIM) has a time complexity of O(Kn^3log(n)), where n is the number of nodes in the network and K is a user-defined parameter. Our simulation results show that K-SLIM on average produce trees with lower cost than other known heuristics.
Summary
The forthcoming transition into the third
millennium, the era of communications, as well as the crucial
transformation in the field of public Croatian telecommunications
represent the occasion for the survay of its current status and
for the vision of its further development.
In this paper, the development of Croatian telecommunications
during the 90-ties will be presented in short. For the
valorisation of their results reached until now, the comparison
with those in world, Europe and the relevant so-called transition
countries is done, too.
The forecast of the further development of Croatian telecom for
the next few years is not based on “the wishfull thinking”
base, but it takes into account the estimation of the population
needs and potentials for spending on telecommunications. Besides,
for the well-known technologies and services the aims are based
on the own past experiences, but for new services they are based
on the experiences of the more developed countries.