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Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors connected as wireless nodes in an ad-hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad-hoc mode instead of the traditional client-server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of disconnection of the network i.e. due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before incurring in disconnections or energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have hence analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and both numerical and simulation-based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective.

In the era of the Internet of Everything, a user with a handheld or wearable device equipped with sensing capability has become a producer as well as a consumer of information and services. The more powerful these devices get, the more likely it is that they will generate and share content locally, leading to the presence of distributed information sources and the diminishing role of centralized servers. As of current practice, we rely on infrastructure acting as an intermediary, providing access to the data. However, infrastructure-based connectivity might not always be available or the best alternative. Moreover, it is often the case where the data and the processes acting upon them are of local scopus. Answers to a query about a nearby object, an information source, a process, an experience, an ability, etc. could be answered locally without reliance on infrastructure-based platforms. The data might have temporal validity limited to or bounded to a geographical area and/or the social context where the user is immersed in. In this envisioned scenario users could interact locally without the need for a central authority, hence, the claim of an infrastructure-less, provider-less platform. The data is owned by the users and consulted locally as opposed to the current approach of making them available globally and stay on forever. From a technical viewpoint, this network resembles a Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network where consumers and producers might be spatially and temporally decoupled exchanging information with each other in an adhoc fashion. To this end, we propose some novel data gathering and dissemination strategies for use in urban-wide environments which do not rely on strict infrastructure mediation. While preserving the general aspects of our study and without loss of generality, we focus our attention toward practical applicative scenarios which help us capture the characteristics of opportunistic communication networks.

The mobile revolution has brought us the possibility to enjoy our favorite applications anywhere and anytime. In this context, interactive games over mobile networks embody a fascinating case study both for their commercial success and for their technical challenges, thus, sparking interest and development. The current state of the art of interactive games over mobile networks is captured in this article. We discuss main requirements and analyze possible combinations of existing solutions to provide better support for highly interactive game sessions with mobile players.

When COVID-19 first struck the provinces of Northern Italy in early 2020 (especially in Lombardy and in EmiliaRomagna), the conditions there made it a perfect storm. The virus outbreak spread with an unusual violence (in the period from late February to April 2020), with a catastrophic toll in terms of human deaths. Taken by surprise, Italy mandated a complete nation-wide lockdown, successively resorting to ministerial decrees alleviating and postponing the restrictions. Now more than ever, there is an increased awareness on ICT used to combat the pandemic. In this article, we present a quantitative analysis evidencing the impact of restrictions on mobility. To this end, we rely on a vehicular mobility dataset confined in the downtown area of Bologna, Italy. Pursuing the objective, we propose a modified version of a state-of-theart data mining algorithm, allowing us to efficiently identify and quantify mobility flows. The proposal, if combined with additional data sources, could allow for a fine-grained and timely decision making, combating the pandemic.

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks are currently experiencing a second youth in terms of research interest as well as providing benefits to our society. Clearly, this has been fostered by the wide range of applications that have become actually feasible thanks to the pervasive and increasing presence of smartphones, drones, sensors and other small devices with communication and sensing capability. Aiming to deploy solutions able to self-organize without the need for any infrastructure support, packet routing remains an open and critical research problem. Several routing solutions have been conceived to guarantee delivery and low overhead in this context. A promising approach, trying to limit the information needed and stored in the network, is represented by stateless solutions, a class of solutions not relying on topology state information. However, since they exploit local knowledge, the achieved performance in terms of packet delivery and latency is not always up to expectations. To this aim, we propose a dynamic routing protocol based on a tabu search approach, relying on local network knowledge and in-packet short-term memory to alleviate the local minima problem. A through experimental assessment is conducted, measuring protocol performance under different configurations and profiles, evidencing its benefits.

Immersive technology is expected to become a key player in the next wave of consumer electronics with potential applications spanning a wide variety of sectors. Yet, there are a number of technological hurdles which need to be addressed. Without speed and computation capability, interactivity cannot be ensured. More than often the constrained nature of the mobile device demands is complemented by cloud ones through the use of cloud offloading techniques. With cloud offloading, battery consumption and processing performance problems are translated into sensor data selection and network latency problems. In this context, we focus our study on some functional building blocks that can be used in conjunction and deployed in a 5G virtualized architecture to alleviate bandwidth and latency requirements of immersive application scenarios. To this end, we have created an experimental scenario exploiting real data to test our combined solution based on the field of view cut and optimized transport protocols, discussing the tradeoffs that emerge.

In this paper, we propose GeoSaW, a delay-tolerant routing protocol for Airborne Networks in Search and Rescue scenarios. The protocol exploits the geographical information of UAVs to make appropriate message forwarding decisions. More precisely, the information about the future UAV&rsquo, s motion path is exploited to select the best UAV carrying the message towards the destination. Simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms the classic DTN routing protocols in terms of several performance metrics.

Computer network infrastructures constitute the critical backbone of every socio-economic ICT system. Consequently, they are becoming increasingly mission-critical in our society since they provide always-on services for many everyday applications (e.g., Cloud Data Centres), safety-critical operations (e.g., Air Traffic Control networks), critical manufacturing services (e.g., Utility networks and Industrial Control Systems), and critical real-time services (e.g., Financial Trading Systems). The resilience and ability of such systems to remain operational in the face of threats is therefore paramount; this needs to be done by taking remedial action and intelligently reshaping their resources. At the same time, current communication architectures do not allow for such informed and adaptive provisioning. In this paper, we introduce the concepts, principles and current research activities related to a new Situation Aware Information Infrastructure (SAI2) framework being developed for next generation ICT environments.