What Accounts for the Differences in Internet Diffusion Rates Around the World?

Clearly, the internet and its applications are pivotal in facilitating the economic activities of nations as well as significantly influencing an individual's work and life. However, the fact is that the internet diffusion rates remain vastly uneven across nations. Why? This chapter attempts to identify some of the key economic, political, cultural, technological, and individual factors that influence the diffusion rates of the internet across the nations of the world. Support for the stated factors is provided by citing existing research studies conducted across many nations. Further, a comprehensive understanding of the factors germane to the diffusion of the internet is essential in formulating and implementing policies that spur the availability and usage of the internet.

Web Site Mobilization Techniques

Mobile-friendly websites are designed to render well on all digital devices, including smartphones, desktop computers, laptop computers, and tablets. Creating a user-friendly experience on mobile devices requires specific web design techniques. These techniques are designed to accommodate the small screens and other physical limitations of mobile devices. This chapter describes the three primary techniques for creating mobile-friendly web sites: responsive, separate URL, and server adaptive. It explains how each technique is implemented, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and their relative popularity. It also describes an emerging mobile technique called accelerated mobile pages.

Visual Identity Design for Responsive Web

Responsive web design, which works for multiple screen sizes and devices, has changed the web ecosystem. However, maintaining a strong and consistent visual identity in a responsive web design is challenging because of the nature of its flexible or liquid layout and navigation. The purpose of this chapter is to identify design strategies for managing the visual identity of a site, the placement of images, and navigation methods that work consistently across the framework of responsive websites and devices.

An Efficient and Effective Index Structure for Query Evaluation in Search Engines

In this chapter, the authors discuss an efficient and effective index mechanism for search engines to support both conjunctive and disjunctive queries. The main idea behind it is to decompose an inverted list into a collection of disjoint sub-lists. The authors associate each word with an interval sequence, which is created by applying a kind of tree coding to a trie structure constructed over all the word sequences in a database. Then, attach each interval, instead of a word, with an inverted sub-list. In this way, both set intersection and union can be conducted by performing a series of simple interval containment checks. Experiments have been conducted, which shows that the new index is promising. Also, how to maintain indices, when inserting or deleting documents, is discussed in great detail.

The Economics of Internetization

Internetization is a new word and concept that has gained currency with the advent of the new global economy of the 21st century. Prior to the ascendance of internetization, economists had embraced the term globalization to describe the operational parameters of the new economy. The problem with the word globalization is that it is neither a new concept nor is it an appropriate descriptive for the contemporary transformational change precipitated by the spectacular technological inventions on the international economic landscape. The new word, internetization, describes more succinctly the transformative powers of the world wide web and the electronic information highway on the evolving dynamics of interconnectivity for the new global economy of the 21st century. Indeed, internetization captures the pervasive influence of technological change and electronic innovations on the global economy and all aspects of human endeavor for our civil society in the 21st century.

Understanding User Experience

User experience determines the quality of an interaction being used by an actor in order to achieve a specific outcome. The actor can have varying roles and evolving needs, thus reviewing and predicting experiences are important. As an actor uses and gains feedback, the feedback guides individual and group behavior, thus becoming pertinent to how interactions occur. This chapter questions how artefacts are designed to promote such interactions and what processes should be incorporated to ensure successful interpretation, use, (physical) reaction, and conation. This chapter discusses the effects of user experiences today based on societal needs and expectations. It shows how the field is delineated into numerous sub-topics, all of which can stand on their own yet still draw from each other. The discussions will include fields such as cognitive science, human-computer interaction, learning sciences, and even ergonomics to show how design and subsequently interactions can assist in having successful user experiences.

Throughput Dependence on SNR in IEEE802.11 WLAN Systems

This chapter seeks to present the dependence of throughput on signal to noise ratio (SNR) in IEEE802.11 WLAN systems. High throughput and low delays are presented as the requirements for indicating good performance of WLAN systems. The multiple communication data rates specified by the physical layer of IEEE802.11 WLANs which vary depending on the SNR observed is shown to appreciably influence the throughput experienced by the users. Cross-layer modelling principles which simplifies the process of estimating the dependence of throughput on SNR is presented. Recent research findings which apply cross-layer modelling principles to model the dependence of throughput on SNR only is presented along with future research directions.

Optimization of Antenna Arrays and Microwave Filters Using Differential Evolution Algorithms

The purpose of this chapter is to briefly describe the DE algorithm and its variants and present their application to antenna and microwave design problems. This chapter presents results from design cases using self-adaptive DE. The chapter discusses the issues, problems, and trends with DE for wireless communications. A brief description of different DE algorithms is also given. The numerical results for different design cases are reported. Moreover, an outline of future research directions is provided. Finally, the chapter concludes and the advantages of using a self-adaptive DE-based approach in the design and optimization of microwave systems and antennas is discussed.

Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking is an emerging networking paradigm that envisages to solve the shortcomings of the host-centric internet. The usage of internet has moved away from the initial host-centric remote access one to predominantly an information serving one. In the new paradigm, information rather than the host takes the central place in serving the users. Hence, the users will search for information and download it from the nearest device holding it. In order to serve the customers better while optimizing the use of network resources, in-network caching is enabled in ICN. In ICN, the intermediate routers will serve as cache repositories in addition to acting as data forwarding devices. There are several ICN architectures proposed in the literature, each having its own merits and demerits. This chapter has taken an in-depth look at the design principles of ICN along with future open research areas that need the immediate attention of the researchers.

A Graph-Intersection-Based Algorithm to Determine Maximum Lifetime Communication Topologies for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

The authors propose a generic graph intersection-based benchmarking algorithm to arrive at upper bounds for the lifetimes of any communication topology that spans the entire network of secondary user (SU) nodes in a cognitive radio ad hoc network wherein the SUs attempt to access the licensed channels that are not in use. At any time, instant t when we need a stable communication topology spanning the entire network, the authors look for the largest value of k such that the intersection of the static SU graphs from time instants t to t+k, defined as the mobile graph Gt...t+k(SU) = Gt(SU) ∩ Gt+1(SU) ∩ .... ∩ Gt+k(SU), is connected and Gt...t+k+1(SU) is not connected. The authors repeat the above procedure for the entire network session to determine the sequence of longest-living instances of the mobile graphs and the corresponding instances of the topology of interest such that the number of topology transitions is the global minimum. They prove the theoretical correctness of the algorithm and study its effectiveness by implementing it to determine a sequence of maximum lifetime shortest path trees.