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This work focused on a basic building block of an allocation unit that carries out the critical job of deciding between the conflicting requests, i.e. an arbiter unit. The purpose of this work is to implement an improved hybrid arbiter while harnessing the basic advantages of a matrix arbiter.

The basic approach of the design methodology involves the extraction of traffic information from buffer signals of each port. As the traffic arrives in the buffer of respective ports, information from these buffers acts as a source of differentiation between the ports receiving low traffic rates and ports receiving high traffic rates. A logic circuit is devised that enables an arbiter to dynamically assign priorities to different ports based on the information from buffers. For implementation and verification of the proposed design, a two-stage approach was used. Stage I comprises comparing the proposed arbiter with other arbiters in the literature using Vivado integrated design environment platform. Stage II demonstrates the implementation of the proposed design in Cadence design environment for application-specific integrated chip level implementation. By using such a strategy, this study aims to have a special focus on the feasibility of the design for very large-scale integration implementation.

According to the simulation results, the proposed hybrid arbiter maintains the advantage of a basic matrix arbiter and also possesses the additional feature of fault-tolerant traffic awareness. These features for a hybrid arbiter are achieved with a 19% increase in throughput, a 1.5% decrease in delay and a 19% area increase in comparison to a conventional matrix arbiter.

This paper proposes a traffic-aware mechanism that increases the throughput of an arbiter unit with some area trade-off. The key feature of this hybrid arbiter is that it can assign priorities to the requesting ports based upon the real-time traffic requirements of each port. As a result of this, the arbiter is dynamically able to make arbitration decisions. Now because buffer information is valuable in winning the priority, the presence of a fault-tolerant policy ensures that none of the priority is assigned falsely to a requesting port. By this, wastage of arbitration cycles is avoided and an increase in throughput is also achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the police officer understandings of human trafficking and their awareness of relevant anti-trafficking policy and legislation, and identify whether this awareness was confined to particular officer demographics.

The study utilised a mixed-methods design, drawing on data from an online survey of 87 police officers from an Australian state police agency.

Thematic analysis identified that, while the majority of participants held broad understandings of human trafficking consistent with the United Nations definition, a substantial number conflated the phenomenon with people smuggling. The majority of participants were also unaware of national anti-trafficking legislation and agency anti-trafficking policy, with constables significantly the least likely to be aware of these measures. Most of these officers, however, indicated they would take some form of case referral action in relation to a suspected case of trafficking, albeit across the sample these responses were inconsistent.

The findings underline the need for relevant training and concrete anti-trafficking policy within frontline agencies, which can facilitate the identification, investigation and referral of human trafficking cases.

While the Australian Federal Government’s response to human trafficking has been subject to ample critique, less attention has been paid to the supporting role played by state-level agencies and their frontline personnel. This paper demonstrates the practical barriers present within such agencies, identifying means to build a more effective response which may bolster the national anti-trafficking measures.

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging area for smart cities as observed in last few decades. However, some hurdles for VANET exist that need to be resolved before its full implementation in smart cities. Routing is one of the main factors for having effective communication between smart vehicles that urgently needs to be addressed. One factor that affects communication between the vehicles is the intersection points that obstruct the communication. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The conventional routing schemes fail to address the intersection problems that occur during the two points of communication. Therefore, this paper analyses the performance of existing position-based routing protocol for inter-vehicle ad hoc networks, considering the impact of a number of intersections. This simulation evaluates different position-based routing protocols such as Intersection-based Distance and Traffic-Aware Routing (IDTAR), Greedy Traffic-Aware Routing, Anchor-based Street and Traffic-Aware Routing and Geographic Source Routing, based on road topology and the number of intersections.

As a result, the protocol IDTAR has a lower end-to-end delay and high packet delivery ratio in terms of the number of intersections as a case study of smart cities. This concludes that IDTAR can be adaptive to smart cities communication, although some questions need to be considered in terms of its security, compatibility, reliability and robustness.

The role of VANET has been highlighted in smart cities due to its implications in day-to-day life. The vehicles in VANET are equipped with wireless communication nodes to provide network connectivity. Such types of network operate without the legacy infrastructure, as well as legacy client/servers.

Additionally, the study contributes to smart cities by measuring the performance of position-based routing protocols for VANETs.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a distributed smartphone sensing-enabled system, which assumes an intelligent transport signaling (ITS) infrastructure that operates traffic lights in a smart city (SC). The system is able to handle priorities between groups of cyclists (crowd-cycling) and traffic when approaching traffic lights at road junctions.

The system takes into consideration normal probability density function (PDF) and analytics computed for a certain group of cyclists (i.e. crowd-cycling). An inference model is built based on real-time spatiotemporal data of the cyclists. As the system is highly distributed – both physically (i.e. location of the cyclists) and logically (i.e. different threads), the problem is treated under the umbrella of multi-agent systems (MAS) modeling. The proposed model is experimentally evaluated by incorporating a real GPS trace data set from the SC of Melbourne, Australia. The MAS model is applied to the data set according to the quantitative and qualitative criteria adopted. Cyclists’ satisfaction (CS) is defined as a function, which measures the satisfaction of the cyclists. This is the case where the cyclists wait the least amount of time at traffic lights and move as fast as they can toward their destination. ITS system satisfaction (SS) is defined as a function that measures the satisfaction of the ITS system. This is the case where the system serves the maximum number of cyclists with the fewest transitions between the lights. Smart city satisfaction (SCS) is defined as a function that measures the overall satisfaction of the cyclists and the ITS system in the SC based on CS and SS. SCS defines three SC policies (SCP), namely, CS is maximum and SS is minimum then the SC is cyclist-friendly (SCP1), CS is average and SS is average then the SC is equally cyclist and ITS system friendly (SCP2) and CS is minimum and SS is maximum then the SC is ITS system friendly (SCP3).

Results are promising toward the integration of the proposed system with contemporary SCs, as the stakeholders are able to choose between the proposed SCPs according to the SC infrastructure. More specifically, cyclist-friendly SCs can adopt SCP1, SCs that treat cyclists and ITS equally can adopt SCP2 and ITS friendly SCs can adopt SCP3.

The proposed approach uses internet connectivity available in modern smartphones, which provide users control over the data they provide to us, to obviate the installation of additional sensing infrastructure. It extends related study by assuming an ITS system, which turns traffic lights green by considering the normal PDF and the analytics computed for a certain group of cyclists. The inference model is built based on the real-time spatiotemporal data of the cyclists. As the system is highly distributed – both physically (i.e. location of the cyclists) and logically (i.e. different threads), the system is treated under the umbrella of MAS. MAS has been used in the literature to model complex systems by incorporating intelligent agents. In this study, the authors treat agents as proxy threads running in the cloud, as they require high computation power not available to smartphones.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effect of the enforcement, which was carried out with ANPRs, on seat belt use. Though the Seat belt Act was enacted in 1992, it did not lead to an expected increase in seat belt use in Turkey including Sanliurfa, which is one of the immense provinces with a population of over 2m. The Sanliurfa Police Department set in an enforcement campaign, in which automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras were used to facilitate an increment in using seat belts in the city center. Under the police leadership, seat belt use enforcement campaign was hugely publicized and sustained throughout the city.

The ANPRs did not have a feature to detect seat belt wearing automatically. Thus, this study tested whether automated plate recognition cameras have a deterrence effect on seat belt usage. To assess the efficacy of this enforcement project, the authors employed a pre/post-implementation design. For this study, the records of the 11 ANPR camera sites, 2 non-camera sites and 2 control sites were utilized.

The results of this study revealed that the seat belt use rate was around 8 percent, before camera enforcement in Sanliurfa. Overall increases were 12 percent during the warning period, 60 percent for the beginning period and 78 percent three months after enforcement began at camera sites. One-way ANOVA results suggested the differences between means of seat belt use counts were statistically significant F (3, 61,596)=15,456, p=0.000.

The findings suggest that there are several reasons for the substantial increase in the seat belt use rate. The first reason for the success of the cameras was their deterrent effect on the drivers, because the drivers were aware that the traffic offense had become readily observable via camera detection in the intersections, and the drivers did not want to be penalized. Second, it is considered that a well-organized publicity of the cameras made a significant contribution to the effectiveness of the enforcement by increasing perceived detection risk. Finally, it is considered that the reason behind the sudden increase in seat belt use was the red-light cameras that had been already in use in Sanliurfa. Namely, the experience of the drivers about camera enforcement gave rise to the rapid decrease in seat belt violation rate in the warning period.

Using cameras (automatic or not) for seat belt enforcement and publicizing this enforcement can help to save resources and lives.

This study found a lot of news about similar enforcement on the internet, but no study was found in the literature that reveals if the enforcement can produce an effective result. Thus, this is the first study in Turkey, may be in the world, that evaluated if cameras of the ANPRS can generate effective seat belt enforcement. Furthermore, the study betokened that traffic violations, which cannot be automatically detected by cameras such as cell phone use and smoking in a vehicle can be effectively enforced by non-automatic cameras. Therefore, we believe that the study will contribute policing and the traffic safety literature.

Cross-layer approach in media access control (MAC) layer will address interference and jamming problems. Hybrid distributed MAC can be used for simultaneous voice, data transmissions in wireless sensor network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Choosing the correct objective function in Nash equilibrium for game theory will address fairness index and resource allocation to the nodes. Game theory optimization for distributed may increase the network performance. The purpose of this study is to survey the various operations that can be carried out using distributive and adaptive MAC protocol. Hill climbing distributed MAC does not need a central coordination system and location-based transmission with neighbor awareness reduces transmission power.

Distributed MAC in wireless networks is used to address the challenges like network lifetime, reduced energy consumption and for improving delay performance. In this paper, a survey is made on various cooperative communications in MAC protocols, optimization techniques used to improve MAC performance in various applications and mathematical approaches involved in game theory optimization for MAC protocol.

Spatial reuse of channel improved by 3%–29%, and multichannel improves throughput by 8% using distributed MAC protocol. Nash equilibrium is found to perform well, which focuses on energy utility in the network by individual players. Fuzzy logic improves channel selection by 17% and secondary users’ involvement by 8%. Cross-layer approach in MAC layer will address interference and jamming problems. Hybrid distributed MAC can be used for simultaneous voice, data transmissions in WSN and IoT applications. Cross-layer and cooperative communication give energy savings of 27% and reduces hop distance by 4.7%. Choosing the correct objective function in Nash equilibrium for game theory will address fairness index and resource allocation to the nodes.

Other optimization techniques can be applied for WSN to analyze the performance.

Game theory optimization for distributed may increase the network performance. Optimal cuckoo search improves throughput by 90% and reduces delay by 91%. Stochastic approaches detect 80% attacks even in 90% malicious nodes.

Channel allocations in centralized or static manner must be based on traffic demands whether dynamic traffic or fluctuated traffic. Usage of multimedia devices also increased which in turn increased the demand for high throughput. Cochannel interference keep on changing or mitigations occur which can be handled by proper resource allocations. Network survival is by efficient usage of valid patis in the network by avoiding transmission failures and time slots’ effective usage.

Literature survey is carried out to find the methods which give better performance.

The purpose of this paper is to clearly identify a problem area in participation and indicate the potential for technology and eParticipation research as a response to the problem.

The approach taken within the paper is to develop a hypothetical argument illustrating deficiencies in the current UK approach to public participation and the use of expert evidence in consultation processes. The argument is developed using traffic analysis as an exemplar of such expert input to planning enquiries.

The literature indicates the current confrontation needs to be replaced by a process that supports informative communication and learning; treats citizens fairly and empowers them to have genuine impact on the decisions. Based on the hypothesis that the capability to re‐organise and present the same data in different forms and contexts enables information technology (IT) to bridge gap between different stakeholder groups the paper proposes the development of a collaborative approach to traffic assessment.

Such an enhanced process with appropriate IT support – SIRTASS – will enable planning activities achieve better decisions with greater community and citizen acceptance. If applied as a general approach there is the potential to significantly improve the speed and quality of the current UK system.

This paper is part of the debate about lack of participation and points to a particular area where research could make a significant contribution.

This cutting-edge short commentary is intended to raise awareness of sex trafficking in the tourism and hospitality industry. The purpose of this paper is to also advocate for further research to identify and hopefully prevent sex trafficking in related settings.

This paper provides a descriptive overview of the current knowledge base on sex trafficking in tourism and hospitality. Based on gaps in the literature, future research agendas and directions are suggested.

Academic research on sex trafficking in tourism and hospitality remains limited. More scholarly attention is needed to this matter. The tourism industry is directly and indirectly associated with sex trafficking (e.g. hotel accommodations and direct consumption of sexual services, such as through sex tourism). Despite legislative efforts by international government agencies to eradicate sex trafficking, the problem remains pervasive. Broader practice- and research-based intervention efforts are needed.

This short commentary advocates for tourism and hospitality researchers to make practical and theoretical industry contributions that may help prevent sex trafficking.