No abstract

Serious games are becoming emerging tools of educational support in the digital age. In this sense, the objective of this study is to evaluate the game about Computer Networks Security CyberCIEGE, in a higher education environment, to identify strengths and weaknesses in its use as a pedagogical tool. It was applied evaluations of the different game aspects. The research showed positive results that can assist in developing strategies for future serious games’ use in the educational field.

Network slicing markets have the potential to increase significantly the utilization of virtualized network resources and facilitate the low-cost deployment of over-the-top services. However, their success is conditioned on the service providers (SPs) being able to bid effectively for the virtualized resources. In this paper, we consider a hybrid advancereservation and spot slice market and study how the SPs should reserve resources to maximize their services' performance while not violating a time-average budget threshold. We consider this problem in its general form where the SP demand and slice prices are time-varying and revealed only after the reservations are decided. We develop a learning-based framework, using the theory of online convex optimization, that allows the SP to employ a no-regret reservation policy, i.e., achieve the same performance with an oracle that has full access to all future demand and prices. We extend the framework to the scenario where the SP decides dynamically its slice orchestration and hence needs to learn the performance-maximizing resource composition; and we further develop a mixed-time scale scheme that allows the SP to leverage spot-market information that is revealed between successive reservations. The proposed learning framework is evaluated using representative simulation scenarios that highlight its efficacy as well as the impact of key system and algorithm parameters.

Laser welding of polymers is a very popular industrial joining process, creating joints with good mechanical performance. However, the implementation of optimized laser welding processes is still quite limited since most industrial applications adopt an empirical approach to adjust the process parameters. The current work provides a summary of new findings on the subject of laser joining of polymers, describing the key operation modes of this joining method, its process parameters and how they affect the joint characteristics. The response of polymers to temperatures generated during laser welding is also discussed, as well as the effect of additives on the weldability of polymers.