QoE oriented cross-layer design of a resource allocation algorithm in beyond 3G systems

Objective Nonattendance for appointments remains a challenge to health care managers and

providers. The objective of this article is to present the results of a study on the impact of appointment reminders sent as short message service text messages to pat ients’ cell phones on nonattendance rates at outpatient clinics in São Paulo, Brazil. Design

Data were collected on scheduled appointments in four medical clinics using Clinic Manager ®

or Clinic Web ® systems that can send automated messages to patients. Data on appointment attendance were collected from these systems. Measurements

More than 29,000 appointments were scheduled between July 1, 2007, and May 31, 2008, and for 7890 of them a text message reminder was sent to the patient's cell phone. The rates of nonattendance were compared between those who were sent and those who were not

sent a text message as an appointment reminder.

Results

The nonattendance reduction rates for appointments at the four outpatient clinics studied

were 0.82% (p = .590), 3.55% (p = .009), 5.75% (p = .022), and 14.49% (p = <.001).

Conclusion

The study results indicate that sending appointment reminders as text messages to patients’ cell phones is an effective strategy to reduce nonattendance rates. When patients attend

their appointments, the facility providing care and the patients receiving uninterrupted care benefit.

Article Outline

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1. Introduction

2. Background

3. Methods

4. Results

5. Discussion

6. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

224 End-to-end optimized TCP-friendly rate control for real-time video streaming over wireless multi-hop

networks Original Research Article

Journal of Visual Communication and Image

Representation , Volume 21, Issue 2, February 2010,

Pages 98-106

Haiyan Luo, Song Ci, Dalei Wu, Hui Tang Close preview | Related articles |

Related reference work articles Abstract | Figures/Tables | References

Abstract

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications. The most

popular rate control scheme over wired networks is TCP-Friendly Rate Control

(TFRC), which is designed to provide optimal transport service for unicast

multimedia delivery based on the TCP Reno’s throughput equation. It assumes

perfect link quality, treating network congestion as the only reason for packet

losses. Therefore, when used in wireless environment, it suffers significant

performance degradation because of packet losses arising from time-varying

link quality. Most current research focuses on enhancing the TFRC protocol

itself, ignoring the tightly coupled relation between the transport layer and

other network layers. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address

this problem, integrating TFRC with the application layer and the physical layer

to form a holistic design for real-time video streaming over wireless multi-hop

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