Wireless networking enables two or more computers to communicate using standard network protocols without network cables. Since their emergence in the 1970s, wireless networks have become increasingly pop ular in the computing industry. In the past decade, wireless networks have enabled true mobility. There are currently two versions of mobile wireless networks. An infrastructure network contains a wired backbone with the last hop being wireless. The cellular phone system is an exam ple of an infrastructure network. A multihop ad hoc wireless network has no infrastructure and is thus entirely...

The increasing con'.;ern for the serious problems of forest decline that occurred in the Northern Hemisphere in the late 1970's and early 1980 's led to an emphasis on the necessity of promoting and setting up investigations into the basic physiological mechanisms of forest trees. Since then, the concern about rapid changes has decreased along with the increase of monitored data on European forests health status. But tree physiology has faced new questions about changing climate and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Advances in plant molecular biology and forest genetics...

In the 1990s the world community has arrived at a particularly in developing countries and in econo- historical turning point. Global issues- the decline mies in transition. These three organizations have of biological diversity, climate change, the fate of different backgrounds and focuses, but have found forest peoples, fresh water scarcity, desertification, it relevant and rewarding to their core operations to deforestation and forest degradation - have come collaborate in WFSE activities. The intention of to dominate the public and political debate about these organizations is to continue...

Both authors have taught the course of "Distributed Systems" for many years in the respective schools. During the teaching, we feel strongly that "Distributed systems" have evolved from traditional "LAN" based distributed systems towards "Internet based" systems. Although there exist many excellent textbooks on this topic, because of the fast development of distributed systems and network programming/protocols, we have difficulty in finding an appropriate textbook for the course of "distributed systems" with orientation to the requirement of the undergraduate level study for today's...

These days, the nature of services and the volume of demand in the telecommu nication industry is changing radically, with the replacement of analog transmis sion and traditional copper cables by digital technology and fiber optic transmis sion equipment. Moreover, we see an increasing competition among providers of telecommunication services, and the development of a broad range of new services for users, combining voice, data, graphics and video. Telecommunication network planning has thus become an important problem area for developing and applying optimization models. Telephone companies...

The consecutive-k system was first studied around 1980, and it soon became a very popular subject. The reasons were many-folded, includ ing: 1. The system is simple and natural. So most people can understand it and many can do some analysis. Yet it can grow in many directions and there is no lack of new topics. 2. The system is simple enough to become a prototype for demonstrat ing various ideas related to reliability. For example, the interesting concept of component importance works best with the consecutive-k system. 3. The system is supported by many applications. Twenty years have gone...

With the rapid growth of bandwidth demand from network users and the advances in optical technologies, optical networks with multiterabits per-second capacity has received significant interest from both researchers and practitioners. Optical networks deployment raises a number of challenging problems that require innovative solutions, including net work architectures, scalable and fast network management, resource efficient routing and wavelength assignment algorithms, QoS support and scheduling algorithms, and switch and router architectures. In this book, we put together some important...

Following the pattern of the Internet growth in popularity, started in the early 1990s, the current unprecedented expansion of wireless technology promises to have an even greater effect on how people communicate and interact, with considerable socio-economic impact all over the world. The driving force behind this growth is the remarkable progress in component miniaturization, integration, and also devel- ments in waveforms, coding, and communication protocols. Besides established infrastructurebased wireless networks (cellular, WLAN, sat- lite) ad-hoc wireless networks emerge as a new...

Combinatorics and Matrix Theory have a symbiotic, or mutually beneficial, relationship. This relationship is discussed in my paper The symbiotic relationship of combinatorics and matrix theoryl where I attempted to justify this description. One could say that a more detailed justification was given in my book with H. J. Ryser entitled Combinatorial Matrix Theon? where an attempt was made to give a broad picture of the use of combinatorial ideas in matrix theory and the use of matrix theory in proving theorems which, at least on the surface, are combinatorial in nature. In the book by Liu and...

The advent of very large scale integrated circuit technology has enabled the construction of very complex and large interconnection networks. By most accounts, the next generation of supercomputers will achieve its gains by increasing the number of processing elements, rather than by using faster processors. The most difficult technical problem in constructing a supercom puter will be the design of the interconnection network through which the processors communicate. Selecting an appropriate and adequate topological structure of interconnection networks will become a critical issue, on which...