Airbnb.com is an online community marketplace that facilitates short-term rentals of "unique spaces" around the world. Since its launch, Airbnb has grown from a few hundred bookings in 2008 to over ten million nights of cumulative bookings worldwide by the end of 2012, spanning more than 300,000 properties in 192 countries. Our work investigates the consequences of the rise of Airbnb as seen by the local economy, focusing on quantifying the impact of Airbnb's growth on the local hotel industry. To explore this question, we consider the state of Texas, where Airbnb adoption exhibits significant spatio-temporal variation across a large number of city-level markets. We leverage a dataset we collected from Airbnb.com,  comprehensively spanning the thousands of Texas properties listed on Airbnb from 2008 to 2013, which we combine with a panel of quarterly tax revenue data for all hotels in the state of Texas from 2001 to 2013. Our analysis provides evidence that the hotel industry has experienced a decrease in revenue due to the entry of Airbnb in the market. Specifically, we find that a 1% increase in the size of the Airbnb market results in a 0.05% decrease in hotel revenue. Furthermore, our results indicate that losses are unevenly distributed among hotels in different price segments, with lower-priced hotels experiencing the largest impact. 

Suppose that we have a network of n processors where each processor knows its own ID and the IDs of its neighbors. Processors communicate in synchronous rounds by writing messages on a whiteboard, which is visible to all of them. The goal is to design a protocol at the end of which every processor knows the topology of the network.

Motivated by limitations in today's host-centric IP network, several recent "clean-slate" network architectures have proposed alternate first-class principals, such as content, services, or users.

Multimedia and information technology are reaching limits in terms of what can be done in multimedia applications with only sight and sound. The next critical step is to bring the sense of “touch” over network connections, which is commonly known as Tele-haptics. Haptics, a term which was derived from the Greek verb “haptesthai” meaning “to touch”, introduces the sense of touch and force into the human-computer interaction. Currently, research on haptics is broadly categorized into human haptics, machine haptics, and computer haptics. Human haptics is mostly conducted by psychologists to study the mechanism of the “touch” modality, while machine haptics refers to the design of haptic devices to reproduce the sense of “touch”.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol used among Internet Service Providers to provide IP connectivity among and across their networks. In this course, we will first review the basics of Internet routing with BGP.

Handoff is a key element in the wireless cellular networks in order to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to the users and to support users’ mobility. Handoff failure will result in the forced termination of an ongoing call. From the user’s point of view, the service of a handoff request is more important, as the forced termination of an ongoing call is more annoying than the blocking of new calls. Therefore, in order to support QoS to the users and to provide ubiquitous coverage, the handoff procedure should be further investigated. The aim of this lecture is to provide a comprehensive survey of the basic elements, the different types and phases of the handoff procedure.

Energy efficiency is one of the great technological challenges of our times. Recently, the concerns for the environmental consequences of the huge rate with which energy is consumed is leading to the awareness that electricity consumption and waste should be reduced in all sectors. The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector makes no exception, since it is becoming a major component of the worldwide energy consumption budget.

The concept of Content Networks (CN) has extended Content Distribution Network (CDN) research in order to also comprise other aspects beyond delivery optimization. One central element of this research is the recognition that users are ultimately interested in the content (or a piece of information) and not any specific copy. This resulted in research on content addressing that allows general content access, i.e., the goal is retrieving content (or information) rather than routing of packets between end hosts. This is called Content-Centric respectively Information-Centric Networking (CCN/ICN). For some time these concepts have been explored for the better provision of and access to content services.

The delivery of live video streams over the plain old best-effort Internet is a major challenge. This talk deals with the issue of under-provisioning in the main delivery platforms, i.e. when the equipments that are in charge of delivering the video do not have enough upload capacity to serve all clients. In general, Content Delivery Networks (like Akamai) make a good job in ensuring large-scale delivery of the most popular streams through edge-servers that are located close to the clients.

Interest in underwater acoustic networking research has grown rapidly in the past few years. Fundamental differences between underwater acoustic propagation and terrestrial radio propagation call for new criteria for the design of communications systems and networking protocols. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the main challenges posed by the underwater acoustic propagation environment, with special emphasis on networking and protocol design issues, and provide novel insights that are useful in guiding both protocol design and network deployment. We will then address in more detail some specific examples of how the unique features of underwater propagation and acoustic modems affect protocol design. In particular, we will (1) focus on the energy consumption profile of acoustic modems and its impact on the design of topology control mechanisms and on the trade-off between sleep cycles and wake-up modes, and (2) present a novel energy-efficient routing protocol for underwater networks that explicitly accounts for the relationship between hop distance, bandwidth, and energy consumption.