Increased Demand Response (DR) is essential to fully exploit European power systems, which in turn is an absolute prerequisite for meeting European targets related to energy efficiency and climate change. Essentially DR involves consumers reducing or shifting their electricity usage during periods of peak electricity demand in response to time-based tariffs or other forms of financial incentives. The opportunities for realising demand response vary across Europe as they are dependent on the particular regulatory, market and technical contexts in different European counties. Nevertheless successful DR programs are becoming increasingly common for large industrial customers. However DR programs aimed at small and medium scale customers have mostly failed to meet their expected potential. Blocks of buildings offer more flexibility in the timing of energy use, local energy generation and energy storage than single buildings and as such researchers and the energy industry are beginning to consider how blocks of buildings can operate collectively within energy networks to enhance the effectiveness of DR programs. This paper identifies the opportunities and technical, market and regulatory requirements for

Fossil fuels deliver most of the flexibility in contemporary electricity systems. The pressing need to reduce CO 2 emissions requires new methods to provide this flexibility. Demand response (DR) offers consumers a significant role in the delivery of flexibility by reducing or shifting their electricity usage during periods of stress or constraint. Blocks of buildings offer more flexibility in the timing and use of energy than single buildings, however, and a lack of relevant scalable ICT tools hampers DR in blocks of buildings. To ameliorate this problem, a current innovation project called "Demand Response in Blocks of Buildings" (DR-BoB: www.dr-bob.eu) has integrated existing technologies into a scalable cloud-based solution for DR in blocks of buildings. The degree to which the DR-BoB energy management solution can increase the ability of any given site to participate in DR is dependent upon its current energy systems, i.e., the energy metering, the telemetry and control technologies in building management systems, and the existence/capacity of local power generation and storage plants. To encourage the owners and managers of blocks of buildings to participate in DR, a method of assessing and validating the technological readiness to participate in DR energy management solutions at any given site is required. This paper describes the DR-BoB energy management solution and outlines what we have called the demand response technology readiness levels (DRTRLs) for the implementation of such a solution in blocks of buildings.

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We present a multi-level multi-overlay hybrid peer-to-peer live video system that enables players of Massively Multiplayer Online Games to simultaneously stream the video of their game and watch the game videos of other players. Each live video bitstream is encoded with rateless codes and multiple trees are used to transmit the encoded symbols. Trees are constructed dynamically with the aim to minimize the transmission rate at the source while maximizing the number of served peers and guaranteeing ontime delivery and reliability. ns-2 simulations and real measurements on the Internet show competitive performance in terms of start-up delay, playback lag, rejection rate, used bandwidth, continuity index, and video quality.