Abstract-This paper reports on the architectural, protocol, physical layer and integrated testbed demonstrations carried out by the DISCUS FP7 consortium in the area of accessmetro network convergence. Our architecture modelling results show the vast potential for cost and power savings that node consolidation can bring. The architecture however also recognises the limitations of long-reach transmission for low latency 5G services, and proposes how to address such shortcomings in future projects. The testbed results, which have been conducted end-to-end, across access-metro and core, and have targeted all the layers of the network, from the application down to the physical layer, show the practical feasibility of the concepts proposed in the project.Index Terms-access metro, network convergence, fixed mobile convergence, long-reach PON, flat optical core, optical island, 5G architecture, next generation multi wavelength PON.

Natural user interfaces are becoming popular. One of the most common natural user interfaces nowadays are voice activated interfaces, particularly smart personal assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of these four smart personal assistants in two dimensions: the correctness of their answers and how natural the responses feel to users. Ninety-two participants conducted the evaluation. Results show that Alexa and Google Assistant are significantly better than Siri and Cortana. However, there is no statistically significant difference between Alexa and Google Assistant.

Abstract-The mass deployment of fibre access networks is probably the most important network upgrade strategy for operators over the coming decade. Next generation networks, and in particular the Long-Reach Passive Optical Network (LR-PON) solution, aim to increase long term economic viability and sustainability of Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) deployment. The LR-PON solution achieves this by minimising the number of nodes and the amount of electronic equipment required within the network. Since a LR-PON replaces the metro backhaul network, which is usually a protected part of the network, protecting the long reach part of LR-PON network against failures becomes a critical issue that needs to be taken into account. In this paper we introduce a novel protection mechanism that, by spreading the load generated by a node failure over the network, can significantly reduce the overall protection capacity required. We then present a practical FTTP deployment scenario based on our protected LR-PON architecture for a European country. The problem is modeled using Integer Linear Programming and the optimisation results, obtained using a real dataset provided by a national operator, show that a small number of Metro/Core nodes can provide protected connection to FTTP users. By applying a detailed cost model to the outcome of the optimisation we are able to show that our LR-PON deployment strategy that minimises the overall protection capacity, rather than just minimising fibre distances in the LR-PON, can significantly reduce costs.Index Terms-Long-Reach passive optical networks, network protection and resiliency, network optimization, cost analysis.

Proteins, soluble in 7 M urea, were extracted from third-instar larval and pupal cuticles of Drosophila melanogaster. Both extracts contain a limited number of polypeptides resolved by one- or two-dimensional electrophoresis. The five major larval proteins have low molecular weights (less than 20000) and are not glycosylated. The major pupal cuticle proteins fall into two size classes: two with apparent molecular weights of 56K and 82K and four with molecular weights between 15K and 25K. The proteins with high apparent molecular weights are glycosylated. In nondenaturing gels, no components of the larval and pupal cuticle extracts comigrate. One-dimensional "fingerprints" indicate that cuticle proteins from these two stages have unique primary structures. Immunological results indicate that the major low molecular weight larval and pupal cuticle proteins are comprised of two families of proteins that share antigenic determinants. The high molecular weight pupal cuticle proteins are immunologically unrelated to the low molecular weight components. We conclude that the pupal and larval proteins are encoded in part by multigene families that have arisen by gene duplication and evolutionary divergence.

Abstract. Constrained path problems have to do with finding paths in graphs subject to constraints. We present a constraint programming approach for solving the Ordered disjoint-paths problem (ODP), i.e., the Disjoint-paths problem where the pairs are associated with ordering constraints. In our approach, we reduce ODP to the Ordered simple path with mandatory nodes problem (OSPMN), i.e., the problem of finding a simple path containing a set of mandatory nodes in a given order. The reduction of the problem is motivated by the fact that we have an appropriate way of dealing with OSPMN based on DomReachability, a propagator that implements a generalized reachability constraint on a directed graph based on the concept of graph variables. The DomReachability constraint has three arguments: (1) a flow graph, i.e., a directed graph with a source node; (2) the dominance relation graph on nodes and edges of the flow graph; and (3) the transitive closure of the flow graph.Our experimental evaluation of DomReachability shows that it provides strong pruning, obtaining solutions with very little search. Furthermore, we show that DomReachability is also useful for defining a good labeling strategy. These experimental results give evidence that DomReachability is a useful primitive for solving constrained path problems over directed graphs.