This book presents the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing that was held at the University of Rennes, France, and organized by Inria, in July 2018. These biennial conferences are major events for Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo researchers. The proceedings include articles based on invited lectures as well as carefully selected contributed papers on all theoretical aspects and applications of Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo methods. Offering information on the latest developments in these very active areas, this book is an excellent reference resource for theoreticians and practitioners interested in solving high-dimensional computational problems, arising, in particular, in finance, statistics and computer graphics.

Starting with the imminent roll-out of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and fourth-Generation networking technology, Next Generation Networks (NGN) are gradually becoming reality, with charging and Quality-of-Service (QoS) issues as two of the key drivers for the evolution toward the convergent all-IP network of the future. Therefore, the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technology (ICQT 2009) was devoted to discussing the most recent approaches, models, and mechanisms in this highly interesting and important research area. The present volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series includes those papers presented at ICQT 2009-collocated this year with the IFIP Networking 2009 conference-taking place on May 15, 2009, in Aachen, Germany and hosted by the Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule (RWTH Aachen). For the commercial success of future QoS-enabled communication services, the emergence of viable business models, pricing schemes, and charging and accounting mechanisms is of paramount importance. Problems in this domain can only be addressed through a broad interdisciplinary approach linking together a variety of technical and economic perspectives, which are constantly driving a plethora of relevant research t- ics for application developers, business architects, network providers, service providers, and customers. Within the current trend toward a convergent NGN architecture, compe- tion modeling, pricing mechanisms, and the economics of inter-domain traffic are of specific importance and urgency. Thus, they determined-in the form of three technical sessions-the core of the ICQT 2009 program.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Euro-FGI International Conference on Network Control and Optimization, NET-COOP 2007, held in Avignon, France in June 2007.

The 22 revised full papers presented together with 9 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. The papers address all current issues in network control and optimization, ranging from performance evaluation and optimization of general stochastic networks to more specific targets such as lower-layer functionalities in mobile networks, routing for computational grids, game theoretic approaches to access control, cooperation, competition and adversary capacities in diverse environments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technologies, ICQT 2006, held in St. Malo, France, in June 2006 as an associated workshop of ACM Sigmetrics / IFIP Performance 2006.

The 8 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 27 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on economy-driven modeling, auctions, peer-to-peer, and secure billing, thus addressing a highly interesting facet of networking research and business modelling.

This book discusses the pros and cons of information and communication (ICT) neutrality. It tries to be as objective as possible from arguments of proponents and opponents, this way enabling readers to build their own opinion. It presents the history of the ongoing network neutrality debate, the various concepts it encompasses, and also some mathematical developments illustrating optimal strategies and potential counter-intuitive results, then extends the discussion to connected ICT domains. The book thus touches issues related to history, economics, law, networking, and mathematics. After an introductory chapter on the history of the topic, chapter 2 surveys and compares the various laws in place worldwide and discusses some implications of heterogeneous rules in several regions. Next, chapter 3 details the arguments put forward by the participants of the net neutrality debate. Chapter 4 then presents how the impact of neutral or non-neutral behaviors can be analyzed mathematically, with sometimes counter-intuitive results, and emphasizes the interest of modeling to avoid bad decisions. Chapter 5 illustrates that content providers may not always be on the pro-neutrality side, as there are situations where they may have an economic advantage with a non-neutral situation, e.g. when they are leaders on a market and create barriers to entry for competitors. Another related issue is covered in chapter 6, which discusses existing ways for ISPs to circumvent the packet-based rules and behave non-neutral without breaking the written law. Chapter 7 gives more insight on the role and possible non-neutral behavior of search engines, leading to another debate called the search neutrality debate. Chapter 8 focuses on e-commerce platforms and social networks, and investigates how they can influence users' actions and opinions. The issue is linked to the debate on the transparency of algorithms which is active in Europe especially. Chapter 9 focuses on enforcing neutrality in practice through measurements: indeed, setting rules requires monitoring the activity of ICT actors in order to sanction non-appropriate behaviors and be proactive against new conducts. The chapter explains why this is challenging and what tools are currently available. Eventually, Chapter 10 briefly concludes the presentation and opens the debate.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2021, in September 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually hosted by the Libera Universita Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), Rome, Italy. The 7 full papers and 2 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. In addition, this book includes 8 work-in-progress papers and 2 extended abstracts. Chapters "AI Technologies and Motives for AI Adoption by Countries and Firms: A Systematic Literature Review"; "Knowledge Management Framework for Cloud Federation"; "Architecture for Orchestrating Containers in Cloud" and "Towards Software Compliance Specification and Enforcement using TOSCA" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, GECON 2020, held in Izola, Slovenia, in September 2020. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually by the University of Ljubljana. The 11 full papers and 9 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are structured in selected topics, namely: Smartness in Distributed Systems; Decentralizing Clouds to Deliver Intelligence at the Edge; Digital Infrastructures for Pandemic Response and Countermeasures; Dependability and Sustainability; Economic Computing and Storage; Poster Session.

Presenting a balance of theory and practice, this up-to-date guide provides a comprehensive overview of the key issues in telecommunication network economics, as well as the mathematical models behind the solutions. These mathematical foundations enable the reader to understand the economic issues arising at this pivotal time in network economics, from business, research and political perspectives. This is followed by a unique practical guide to current topics, including app stores, volume-based pricing, auctions for advertisements, search engine business models, the network neutrality debate, the relationship between mobile operators and mobile virtual network operators, and the economics of security. The guide discusses all types of players in telecommunications, from users, to access and transit network providers, to service providers (including search engines, cloud providers or content delivery networks), to content providers and regulatory bodies. Ideal for graduate students, researchers and industry practitioners working in telecommunications.