Gut microbiota and human relationships are strictly connected to each other. What we eat reflects our body-mind connection and synchronizes with people around us. However, how this impacts on gut microbiota and, conversely, how gut bacteria influence our dietary behaviors has not been explored yet. To quantify the complex dynamics of this interplay between gut and human behaviors we explore the "gut-human behavior axis" and its evolutionary dynamics in a real-world scenario represented by the social multiplex network. We consider a dual type of similarity, homophily and gut similarity, other than psychological and unconscious biases. We analyze the dynamics of social and gut microbial communities, quantifying the impact of human behaviors on diets and gut microbial composition and, backwards, through a control mechanism. Meal timing mechanisms and "chrono-nutrition" play a crucial role in feeding behaviors, along with the quality and quantity of food intake. Considering a population of shift workers, we explore the dynamic interplay between their eating behaviors and gut microbiota, modeling the social dynamics of chrono-nutrition in a multiplex network. Our findings allow us to quantify the relation between human behaviors and gut microbiota through the methodological introduction of gut metabolic modeling and statistical estimators, able to capture their dynamic interplay. Moreover, we find that the timing of gut microbial communities is slower than social interactions and shift-working, and the impact of shift-working on the dynamics of chrono-nutrition is a fluctuation of strategies with a major propensity for defection (e.g. high-fat meals). A deeper understanding of the relation between gut microbiota and the dietary behavioral patterns, by embedding also the related social aspects, allows improving the overall knowledge about metabolic models and their implications for human health, opening the possibility to design promising social therapeutic dietary interventions.

One of the main targets related to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to reduce power consumption of nodes and of the whole network. An ideal WSN should be networked, scalable, fault-tolerant, energy-aware, and also smart and efficient. Unfortunately, however, this is not always true. The basic idea of the proposal is that senders use a heuristic approach to select the sub-optimal next hop in order to reach just one sink, considering some key requirements such as general performance (QoS and security), efficiency, trust ability, high computational power and energy-aware behaviour. Our model tries to satisfy the need for reaching the nearest sink node, considering a trade-off between the shortest path and heuristic decisions, in a top-level strategy based on a heuristic approach in order to reduce the overall power consumption of nodes of the network.

Seamless mobility is a requirement whose importance for Internet users nowadays is growing faster than ever Thus many solutions to manage wireless IP mobile access and inter-working with the fixed Internet are already available and more are currently being studied and improved In this paper we described an actual wireless mobility framework we designed and implemented in our university campus, which is spread over a wide metropolitan area. The aim is to let a mobile host, that is a user equipped i.e. with a PDA device, experience real wireless IP mobility while moving on a large spatial scale, by means of a middleware that leverages from three main wireless access technologies: Bluetooth, WiFi and GPRS. In our framework, these are managed as a hierarch), of spatially overlapping access domains. While the user is on the move, the client-side of the middleware running on our mobile PDA device triggers smart switchings between the currently best available and more appropriate wireless access path, based on locally collected information. On the other hand, the network-side part of the middleware manages mobile host location paging and routing-update functions inside the whole campus area with an approach which extends from the Cellular IP micromobility protocol. We call this approach WiFi bridge since it also adds mobile hosts with the capability to seamlessly travel between disjunct WiFi access domains inside the campus by means of a temporary relay onto the GPRS access domain. We implemented and tested the system in a real testbed using IPaq devices running Linux, obtaining encouraging experimental results.

A previous development in the field of telecommunication networks has enabled the evolution of distributed systems, and has favoured the development of a new generation of applications based on the use of mobile agents. In fact, during the last few years, several agent platforms have been created; however the architectures and implementation of such platforms are very different, and this makes their interaction difficult. In order to favour the interaction among differently implemented platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) has proposed the Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility (MASIF) standard, which includes some definitions and interfaces which all platforms have to comply with. We present the MAP platform for developing and managing mobile agents; it complies with MASIF in order to communicate and interact with similar platforms provided that they comply with the mentioned standard. Besides, we present a mechanism, which has been implemented in the MAP, which extends MASIF's functionalities so to enable the interaction among agents and agent systems operating in different regions.

Network programmability seems to be a promising solution to network management and quality of service (QoS) control. Software mobile-agents technology is boosting the evolution toward application-level control of network functionalities. Code may be deployed in the network dynamically and on demand for the benefit of applications or application classes. Agents support a dynamic distribution of control and management functions across networks, thus increasing flexibility and efficiency. We propose to use mobile-agent technology to overcome some of the problems inherent in current Internet technology. We focus our attention to QoS monitoring, being locally significant in network subdomains, and realize a QoS management strategy in response to variations of user, customer of application requirements, and of the network state. We describe our experience and the results obtained from our testbed, where software agents are instantiated, executed, migrated, and suspended in order to implement flexible QoS management in IP networks.

The skew affecting a multimedia traffic stream when N multimedia streams are mixed in an ATM multiplexer is evaluated. To this purpose a multimedia source is modeled by an arrival process defined as the superposition of heterogeneous correlated arrival processes, each of which models one monomedia source by means of an Markov modulated Bernoulli process (MMBP) process whose transition probabilities are functions of the state of the other monomedia sources.

The CCITT has defined the reference architecture for general network management, called telecommunication network management (TNM), as a logical definition and partition of functionalities. The TNM is assumed as a guideline, and a proposal for metropolitan area network (MAN) management in a public and private environment is examined. Such a hierarchical architecture is presented in a multiservices scenario, allowing the use of it in distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) MANs. The definition of functionalities for each management entity is given, and the way in which the entities work using the DQDB MAN parameters is discussed.>

An architecture and a media access control (MAC) protocol aimed at improving fairness in dual-bus networks are introduced. The major feature of this proposal is that the distributed operation of updating the queue is made atomic, so that the average bus access delay is equalized over the network. An equalized access gain is provided by mandating that a station waiting for transmission consider itself as positioned in the distributed queue only after a constant delay, which is needed for all the other stations to register the request of the first one. This delay is equal to the propagation time of the request along the entire bus. It is shown that under certain conditions the average access delay results in the one experienced in the distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) by those stations which are placed at the middle of the bus. Consequently, the global end-to-end delay remains much below the limits fixed by the CCITT for delay sensitive services. The actual average delay is even smaller than the one estimated due to the presence in the protocol of the stand-by mechanism which is the same as in the DQDB version. In comparison with the traditional DQDB, the increase in access-delay values is rewarded by the significant improvement in terms of fairness.>