Macroeconomic Instability and Terrorism Nexus: Empirical Evidence in Case of Pakistan

The current study is an attempt to analyze the association between macroeconomic instability and terrorism in Pakistan over the period of 1970 to 2020. Six important variables are taken as a proxy to measure macroeconomic instability which includes external debt, budget deficit, trade deficit, real effective exchange rate (REER), inflation and unemployment. Results indicate that there exists a long run cointegration relationship between the indictors of macroeconomic instability and terrorism. FMOLS is employed to obtain the estimates and it reveals that budget deficit and external debt is negatively associated with terrorism. It indicates that government expenditures on different project such as infrastructure create economic opportunities, therefore, reduces terrorism. Furthermore, welfare programmes also improve the performance of socioeconomic variables that translates into harmonized environment which lessens violence. The variable of trade deficit, inflation and unemployment has positive impact on terrorism while REER is insignificant. In context of trade deficit, higher imports results in job loss of domestic industries, hence, it hits the vulnerable groups. Therefore, the opportunity cost of life of these groups reduces and it increases the probability to become a part of terrorist activities. Inflation also pushes the vulnerable groups in poverty by reduces the purchasing power and unemployed individuals are also easy target to get involve themselves in acts of aggression. This study also constructs the macroeconomic instability index including the six variables through principal component analysis (PCA). Results of this model show that macroeconomic instability index and GDP has positive effect on terrorism. In case of GDP, the plausible reason could be uneven income distribution that increases terrorist activities. For the policy implications, government need to divert the resources from non-productive to productive uses through the investment in such projects which has direct and indirect impact on the welfare. In this way deprived group will enjoy economic perks and engage themselves in productive activities rather than becoming a helping hand in terrorism.

On Content Caching Mechanisms for Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is believed an alternative and future network to the host-centric model of the existing Internet infrastructure. ICN focuses on distribution and retrieval of contents instead of transfer of information between endpoints. It is based on the concept of publish-subscribe, naming and in-network caching. The concept of caching is universal in ICN and it is used within networks for reducing latency of information to users. Contents can be distributed in on-path caching or off-path caching. Off-path caching can be compared with tradition caching of content while on-path caching is more near and specific to ICN. The default caching strategy proposed for ICN is Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) which leaves a copy of content on every node of a network that the INTEREST packet has traversed. But this caching strategy causes a huge redundancy, source consumption in network that minimizes the effectiveness of ICN. Popularity is a major factor we have to care about while caching content in network as it consumes more resources to cache content on every node that has requested by any user. Some contents in the network are requested more as compared to other so this factor can play an effective role in caching content in ICN. Other factor we need to take care about is caching content near end users so as to reduce the latency of information retrieval. In this research work, we have designed two caching strategies of LeafPop and LeafPopDown for ICN based on the factor of popularity. The objectives of designed caching strategies are reducing redundancy that default caching strategy of LCE is creating in ICN. In order to achieve desired objective, the content is placed in the network based on popularity factor in both caching strategies. In addition of considering popularity factor, content is placed near the end users so that latency to the end users could be minimized. The designed caching strategy of LeafPop is first evaluated against the default caching strategy of Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) and popularity based caching strategy of Max-Gain In-network Caching (MAGIC) in terms of performance metrics of cache hits, diversity and eviction operations in same simulation environment. The LeafPop caching strategy is then compared with the new caching strategy of LeafPopDown for the same performance metrics. The proposed caching strategy of LeafPop is examined on SocialCCNSim simulator against the selected caching strategies. The results are evaluated on three topologies of Abilene, DTelekom and Tiger with α = 0.88, 1.1 and cache size of 1 GB and 10 GB. We have used Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement policy for the caching eviction operations. LeafPopDown caching strategy is then examined against LeafPop caching strategy on the same simulator. Here, the results are again evaluated on same three topologies of Abilene, DTelekom and Tiger with α = 0.88, 1.1 and cache size of 1 GB and 10 GB. The simulation results show that proposed caching strategy of LeafPop outperforms as compared to LCE and MAGIC in terms of cache hit, diversity and eviction operations. LeafPop caching strategy significantly increases cache hit on two topologies of Abilene and Tiger when we have cache sizes of 1 GB and 10 GB and α = 0.88, 1.1. The second proposed caching strategy of LeafPopDown outperforms against LeafPop in terms of cache hits, diversity and eviction operations on the chosen simulation parameters.