THE MULTIPLE LOCATION TIME WEIGHTED INDEX: USING PATIENT ACTIVITY SPACES TO CALCULATE PRIMARY CARE SERVICE AREAS

Geographic health planning analyses, such as service area calculations, are hampered by a lack of patient-specific geographic data. Using the limited patient address information in patient management systems, planners analyze patient origin based on home address. But activity space research done sparingly in public health and extensively in non-health related arenas uses multiple addresses per person when analyzing accessibility. Also, health care access research has shown that there are many non-geographic factors that influence choice of provider. Most planning methods, however, overlook non-geographic factors influencing choice of provider, and the limited data mean the analyses can only be related to home address. This research attempted to determine to what extent geography plays a part in patient choice of provider and to determine if activity space data can be used to calculate service areas for primary care providers. During Spring 2008, a convenience sample of 384 patients of a locally-funded Community Health Center in Houston, Texas, completed a survey that asked about what factors are important when he or she selects a health care provider. A subset of this group (336) also completed an activity space log that captured location and time data on the places where the patient regularly goes. Survey results indicate that for this patient population, geography plays a role in their choice of health care provider, but it is not the most important reason for choosing a provider. Other factors for choosing a health care provider such as the provider offering “free or low cost visits”, meeting “all of the patient’s health care needs”, and seeing “the patient quickly” were all ranked higher than geographic reasons. Analysis of the patient activity locations shows that activity spaces can be used to create service areas for a single primary care provider. Weighted activity-space-based service areas have the potential to include more patients in the service area since more than one location per patient is used. Further analysis of the logs shows that a reduced set of locations by time and type could be used for this methodology, facilitating ongoing data collection for activity-space-based planning efforts.

Considering the Consequences of Child Welfare Service Decisions

The following commentary serves as a response to the article, “That Wall is Around My Heart,” underscoring the importance of decision making in child welfare services. The commentary supports the need for child welfare systems to carefully consider the long-term consequences of various service intervention strategies. Child welfare systems must attend to both the internal external elements of safety, giving special attention to the emotional trauma of child maltreatment and the trauma resulting from removal and placement in alternative care. The commentary supports the need for child welfare systems to provide effective interventions that prevent and respond to child abuse and neglect, as well as break the cyclical nature of child maltreatment, helping ensure the safety of children and families for future generations.

An Architecture to offer Cloud-Based Radio Access Network as a Service

This paper addresses the novel notion of offering a radio access network as a service. Its components may be instantiated on general purpose platforms with pooled resources (both radio and hardware ones) dimensioned on-demand, elastically and following the pay-per-use principle. A novel architecture is proposed that supports this concept. The architecture's success is in its modularity, well-defined functional elements and clean separation between operational and control functions. By moving much processing traditionally located in hardware for computation in the cloud, it allows the optimisation of hardware utilization and reduction of deployment and operation costs. It enables operators to upgrade their network as well as quickly deploy and adapt resources to demand. Also, new players may easily enter the market, permitting a virtual network operator to provide connectivity to its users.

Virtual Infrastructures as a Service enabling Converged Optical Networks and Data Centres

Abstract Cloud computing service emerged as an essential component of the Enterprise {IT} infrastructure. Migration towards a full range and large-scale convergence of Cloud and network services has become the current trend for addressing requirements of the Cloud environment. Our approach takes the infrastructure as a service paradigm to build converged virtual infrastructures, which allow offering tailored performance and enable multi-tenancy over a common physical infrastructure. Thanks to virtualization, new exploitation activities of the physical infrastructures may arise for both transport network and Data Centres services. This approach makes network and Data Centres’ resources dedicated to Cloud Computing to converge on the same flexible and scalable level. The work presented here is based on the automation of the virtual infrastructure provisioning service. On top of the virtual infrastructures, a coordinated operation and control of the different resources is performed with the objective of automatically tailoring connectivity services to the Cloud service dynamics. Furthermore, in order to support elasticity of the Cloud services through the optical network, dynamic re-planning features have been provided to the virtual infrastructure service, which allows scaling up or down existing virtual infrastructures to optimize resource utilisation and dynamically adapt to users’ demands. Thus, the dynamic re-planning of the service becomes key component for the coordination of Cloud and optical network resource in an optimal way in terms of resource utilisation. The presented work is complemented with a use case of the virtual infrastructure service being adopted in a distributed Enterprise Information System, that scales up and down as a function of the application requests.

SLA-Driven Simulation of Multi-Tenant Scalable Cloud-Distributed Enterprise Information Systems

Cloud Computing is an enabler for delivering large-scale, distributed enterprise applications with strict requirements in terms of performance. It is often the case that such applications have complex scaling and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management requirements. In this paper we present a simulation approach for validating and comparing SLA-aware scaling policies using the CloudSim simulator, using data from an actual Distributed Enterprise Information System (dEIS). We extend CloudSim with concurrent and multi-tenant task simulation capabilities. We then show how different scaling policies can be used for simulating multiple dEIS applications. We present multiple experiments depicting the impact of VM scaling on both datacenter energy consumption and dEIS performance indicators.

A Case for CDN-as-a-Service in the Cloud: A Mobile Cloud Networking Argument

Content Distribution Networks are mandatory components of modern web architectures, with plenty of vendors offering their services. Despite its maturity, new paradigms and architecture models are still being developed in this area. Cloud Computing, on the other hand, is a more recent concept which has expanded extremely quickly, with new services being regularly added to cloud management software suites such as OpenStack. The main contribution of this paper is the architecture and the development of an open source CDN that can be provisioned in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model thereby enabling the CDN as a Service paradigm. We describe our experience with integration of CDNaaS framework in a cloud environment, as a service for enterprise users. We emphasize the flexibility and elasticity of such a model, with each CDN instance being delivered on-demand and associated to personalized caching policies as well as an optimized choice of Points of Presence based on exact requirements of an enterprise customer. Our development is based on the framework developed in the Mobile Cloud Networking EU FP7 project, which offers its enterprise users a common framework to instantiate and control services. CDNaaS is one of the core support components in this project as is tasked to deliver different type of multimedia content to several thousands of users geographically distributed. It integrates seamlessly in the MCN service life-cycle and as such enjoys all benefits of a common design environment, allowing for an improved interoperability with the rest of the services within the MCN ecosystem.

Service Level Agreements-Driven Management of Distributed Applications in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud Computing enables provisioning and distribution of highly scalable services in a reliable, on-demand and sustainable manner. However, objectives of managing enterprise distributed applications in cloud environments under Service Level Agreement (SLA) constraints lead to challenges for maintaining optimal resource control. Furthermore, conflicting objectives in management of cloud infrastructure and distributed applications might lead to violations of SLAs and inefficient use of hardware and software resources. This dissertation focusses on how SLAs can be used as an input to the cloud management system, increasing the efficiency of allocating resources, as well as that of infrastructure scaling. First, we present an extended SLA semantic model for modelling complex service-dependencies in distributed applications, and for enabling automated cloud infrastructure management operations. Second, we describe a multi-objective VM allocation algorithm for optimised resource allocation in infrastructure clouds. Third, we describe a method of discovering relations between the performance indicators of services belonging to distributed applications and then using these relations for building scaling rules that a CMS can use for automated management of VMs. Fourth, we introduce two novel VM-scaling algorithms, which optimally scale systems composed of VMs, based on given SLA performance constraints. All presented research works were implemented and tested using enterprise distributed applications.

Demo -- Closer to Cloud-RAN: RAN as a Service

Commoditization and virtualization of wireless networks are changing the economics of mobile networks to help network providers (e.g., MNO, MVNO) move from proprietary and bespoke hardware and software platforms toward an open, cost-effective, and flexible cellular ecosystem. In addition, rich and innovative local services can be efficiently created through cloudification by leveraging the existing infrastructure. In this work, we present RANaaS, which is a cloudified radio access network delivered as a service. RANaaS provides the service life-cycle of an ondemand, elastic, and pay as you go 3GPP RAN instantiated on top of the cloud infrastructure. We demonstrate an example of realtime cloudified LTE network deployment using the OpenAirInterface LTE implementation and OpenStack running on commodity hardware as well as the flexibility and performance of the platform developed.

Information Systems Outsourcing: Towards Sustainable Business Value

This book attempts to synthesize research that contributes to a better understanding of how to reach sustainable business value through information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics in this realm are how IS outsourcing can contribute to innovation, how it can be dynamically governed, how to cope with its increasing complexity through multi-vendor arrangements, how service quality standards can be met, how corporate social responsibility can be upheld and how to cope with increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing and platform-based cooperation. These issues are viewed from either the client or vendor perspective, or both. The book should be of interest to all academics and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management and Organization as well as corporate executives and professionals who seek a more profound analysis and understanding of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.

EASE: EPC as a service to ease mobile core network deployment over cloud

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of on-demand creation of cloud-based elastic mobile core networks, along with their lifecycle management. For this purpose the article describes the key elements to realize the architectural vision of EPC as a Service, an implementation option of the Evolved Packet Core, as specified by 3GPP, which can be deployed in cloud environments. To meet several challenging requirements associated with the implementation of EPC over a cloud infrastructure and providing it “as a Service,” this article presents a number of different options, each with different characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. A thorough analysis comparing the different implementation options is also presented.

Software Development in the Cloud: Exploring the Affordances of Platform-as-a-Service

Software development teams increasingly adopt platform-as-a-service (PaaS), i.e., cloud services that make software development infrastructure available over the internet. Yet, empirical evidence of whether and how software development work changes with the use of PaaS is difficult to find. We performed a grounded-theory study to explore the affordances of PaaS for software development teams. We find that PaaS enables software development teams to enforce uniformity, to exploit knowledge embedded in technology, to enhance agility, and to enrich jobs. These affordances do not arise in a vacuum. Their emergence is closely interwoven with changes in methodologies, roles, and norms that give rise to self-organizing, loosely coupled teams. Our study provides rich descriptions of PaaS-based software development and an emerging theory of affordances of PaaS for software development teams.

A Demonstration of Mobility Prediction as a Service in Cloudified LTE Networks

Location prediction has attracted a significant amount of research effort. Being able to predict users’ movement benefits a wide range of communication systems, including location-based service/applications, mobile access control, mobile QoS provision, and resource management for mobile computation and storage management. In this demo, we present MOBaaS, which is a cloudified Mobility and Bandwidth prediction services that can be instantiated, deployed, and disposed on-demand. Mobility prediction of MOBaaS provides location predictions of a single/group user equipments (UEs) in a future moment. This information can be used for self-adaptation procedures and optimal network function configuration during run-time operations. We demonstrate an example of real-time mobility prediction service deployment running on OpenStack platform, and the potential benefits it bring to other invoking services.