Higher Risk of Incident HCV-Coinfections in MSM with a Wide HIV Transmission Bottleneck

BACKGROUND  High-risk sexual behaviors have been suggested as drivers of the recent dramatic increase of sexually-transmitted HCV among HIV-infected men who have sex with men(MSM). METHODS  We assessed the association between the HIV-transmission-bottleneck and the prevalence and incidence of HCV-coinfections in HIV-infected MSM from the Swiss-HIV-Cohort-Study(SHCS). As a proxy for the width of the transmission bottleneck we used the fraction of ambiguous nucleotides in Genotypic-Resistance-Tests(GRTs) from recent HIV-infections. We defined a broad bottleneck as a fraction of ambiguous nucleotides exceeding a previously-established threshold(0.5%). RESULTS  From the SHCS, we identified 671 MSMs with available HCV-serologies and with a HIV-GRT sampled during recent infection. Of those, 161(24.0%) exhibited a broad HIV-transmission-bottleneck, 38(5.7%) had at least one positive HCV test, and 26(3.9%) had an incident HCV infection. Individuals with broad HIV-transmission bottlenecks exhibited a twofold-higher odds of having ever experienced an HCV coinfection(OR[95%CI]=2.2[1.1, 4.3]) and a threefold-higher hazard of an incident HCV infection(HR[95%CI]= 3.0[1.4, 6.6]) than individuals with narrow HIV-transmission-bottlenecks. CONCLUSIONS  Our results indicate that the currently occurring sexual spread of HCV is focused on those MSMs that are prone to exhibit broad HIV-transmission-bottlenecks. This is consistent with an important role of high-risk behavior and mucosal-barrier-impairment in the transmission of HCV among MSM.

Mobility and bandwidth prediction in virtualized LTE systems: Architecture and challenges

Long Term Evolution (LTE) represents the fourth generation (4G) technology which is capable of providing high data rates as well as support of high speed mobility. The EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) project integrates the use of cloud computing concepts in LTE mobile networks in order to increase LTE's performance. In this way a shared distributed virtualized LTE mobile network is built that can optimize the utilization of virtualized computing, storage and network resources and minimize communication delays. Two important features that can be used in such a virtualized system to improve its performance are the user mobility and bandwidth prediction. This paper introduces the architecture and challenges that are associated with user mobility and bandwidth prediction approaches in virtualized LTE systems.

Mobility and Bandwidth Prediction as a Service in Virtualized LTE Systems

Recently telecommunication industry benefits from infrastructure sharing, one of the most fundamental enablers of cloud computing, leading to emergence of the Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) concept. The most momentous intents by this approach are the support of on-demand provisioning and elasticity of virtualized mobile network components, based on data traffic load. To realize it, during operation and management procedures, the virtualized services need be triggered in order to scale-up/down or scale-out/in an instance. In this paper we propose an architecture called MOBaaS (Mobility and Bandwidth Availability Prediction as a Service), comprising two algorithms in order to predict user(s) mobility and network link bandwidth availability, that can be implemented in cloud based mobile network structure and can be used as a support service by any other virtualized mobile network services. MOBaaS can provide prediction information in order to generate required triggers for on-demand deploying, provisioning, disposing of virtualized network components. This information can be used for self-adaptation procedures and optimal network function configuration during run-time operation, as well. Through the preliminary experiments with the prototype implementation on the OpenStack platform, we evaluated and confirmed the feasibility and the effectiveness of the prediction algorithms and the proposed architecture.