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.

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. 

We consider Internet-based Master-Worker task computing systems, such as SETI@home, where a master sends tasks to potentially unreliable workers, and the workers execute and report back the result.

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.

We investigate the energy saving made possible by the network sharing approach, whereby all (or significant parts) of a network infrastructure are shared by different network operators. Our study reveals that in most European countries the amount of energy necessary to run mobile networks can be reduced by 35 to 60%.

2013 IEEE Online Conference on Green Communications is the 3rd edition of IEEE OnlineGreenComm conducted entirely online and dedicated to addressing the challenges in energy-efficient communications and communications for green technologies.

Opportunistic scheduling was initially proposed to exploit user channel diversity for network capacity enhancement. However, the achievable gain of opportunistic schedulers is generally restrained due to fairness considerations which impose a tradeoff between fairness and throughput. In this paper, we show via analysis and numerical simulations that opportunistic scheduling not only increases network throughput dramatically, but also increases energy efficiency and can be fair to the users when they cooperate, in particular by using D2D communications. We propose to leverage smartphone's dual-radio interface capabilities to form clusters among mobile users. We design simple, scalable and energy-efficient D2D-assisted opportunistic strategies, which would incentivize mobile users to form clusters. We use a coalitional game theory approach to analyze the cluster formation mechanism, and show that proportional fair-based intra-cluster payoff distribution brings significant incentive to all mobile users regardless of their channel quality.

Find out what's inside a cellphone, a television set, the human body, … with the help of researchers from the IMDEA Institutes. Discover the huge amount of science and technology that surrounds our lives, making them more comfortable, simpler and safer, and meet those who are engaged in advancing science and technology every day. Science in Your Living Room is the activity of the IMDEA Institutes in European initiative The Researchers' Night 2013. Its main objective is to present to the public the large amount of science and technology involved in almost every object and service around us. The audience is invited to interact and discover the appeal of the work of the researchers. The goal of this activity is to analyze, with the help of the audience, how different our life would be without science, stress the importance of science and technology for social welfare, and show how rewarding and interesting is getting involved in science and technology.

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.

The EC FP7 Network of Excellence TREND (Towards Real Energy-efficient Network Design – see http://www.fp7-trend.eu/ ) organizes a PhD School in the field of energy-efficient networking, encompassing all issues that relate to a wiser, more parsimonious, approach to energy consumption in networking.