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The manyfold capacity magnification promised by dense 5G networks will make possible the provisioning of broadband multimedia services, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mobile immersive video, to name a few. These new applications will coexist with classic ones and contribute to the exponential growth of multimedia services in mobile networks. At the same time, the different requirements of past and old services pose new challenges to the effective usage of 5G resources. In response to these challenges, a novel Stochastic Optimization framework for Green Multimedia Services named SOGMS is proposed herein that targets the maximization of system throughput and the minimization of energy consumption in data delivery. In particular, Lyapunov optimization is leveraged to face this optimization objective, which is formulated and decomposed into three tractable subproblems. For each subproblem, a distinct algorithm is conceived, namely quality of experience--based admission control, cooperative resource allocation, and multimedia services scheduling. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the proposed method against state-of-art solutions in dense 5G networks.

Thanks to its inherent capabilities (such as fairly long radio coverage with extremely low power consumption), long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) can support a wide spectrum of low-rate use-cases in Industry 4.0. In this article, both plain and energy harvesting (EH) industrial environments are considered to study the performance of LoRa radios for industrial automation. In the first instance, a model is presented to investigate LoRaWAN in Industry 4.0 in terms of battery life, battery replacement cost, and damage penalty. Then, the EH potential, available within an Industry 4.0, is highlighted to demonstrate the impact of harvested energy on the battery life and sensing interval of LoRa motes deployed across a production facility. The key outcome of these investigations is the cost trade-off analysis between battery replacement and damage penalty along different sensing intervals which demonstrates a linear increase in aggregate cost up to £1500 in case of 5 min sensing interval in the plain (nonenergy harvesting) industrial environment while it tends to decrease after a certain interval up to five times lower in EH scenarios. In addition, the carbon emissions due to the presence of LoRa motes and the annual $\text{CO}_{2}$ emission savings per node have been recorded up to 3 kg/kWh when fed through renewable energy sources. The analysis presented herein could be of great significance toward a green industry with cost and energy efficiency optimization.

Information-Centric Networking emerged as a powerful enabling technology for the provisioning of scalable and efficient real-time services in Future Internet, mobile architectures, and multi-hop wireless mesh networks. To serve mobile consumers, most of scientific contributions suggest to extend the information-centric communication primitives by means of a pull-based methodology, according to which the mobile consumer issues pending requests every time it reaches a new network attachment point. This approach, however, generates two important shortcomings. First, the requests delivered before the handover will generate stale paths with wrong forwarding information in their network routers. As a consequence, some new contents will be delivered also to previous locations, thus wasting bandwidth. Second, during handovers, mobile consumers may miss some contents released in real-time and lose the synchronization with the remote producer. In order to solve these issues, this work conceives a novel protocol architecture that successfully integrates and properly customizes the key functionalities of Information-Centric Networking, Multi-access Edge Computing, and Software Defined Networking paradigms. Specifically, the designed approach envisages that (1) Multi-access Edge Computing assists mobile consumers in retrieving data, while transparently managing the information-centric communication primitives and recovering the synchronization with the remote producer after the handover, (2) Software-Defined Controllers dynamically configure forwarding functionalities, and (3) Information-Centric Networking enables efficient data dissemination and delivers network control instructions. The impact of the devised protocol architecture on the communication overhead is analytically formulated and evaluated in scenarios with different topology, mobility, application settings, and number of mobile consumers. The comparison with respect to the pure Information-Centric Networking deployment demonstrates that the proposed solution ensures a reduction of the communication overhead up to 99.99% on the data plane, an overall bandwidth saving up to 99.93%, and a not negligible memory saving in intermediary routers. At the same time, the adoption of information-centric communication primitives for the control plane achieves an overhead reduction ranging from 29.36% to 51.13% with respect to an implementation based on the conventional OpenFlow protocol.

A new Domain Name System (DNS) cache poisoning attack aiming at clients has emerged recently. It induced cloud users to visit fake web sites and thus reveal information such as account passwords. However, the design of current DNS defense architecture does not formally consider the protection of clients. Although the DNS traffic encryption technology can alleviate this new attack, its deployment is as slow as the new DNS architecture. Thus we propose a lightweight adaptive intelligent defense strategy, which only needs to be deployed on the client without any configuration support of DNS. Firstly, we model the attack and defense process as a static stochastic game with incomplete information under bounded rationality conditions. Secondly, to solve the problem caused by uncertain attack strategies and large quantities of game states, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with guaranteed monotonic improvement. Finally, through the prototype system experiment in Alibaba Cloud, the effectiveness of our method is proved against multiple attack modes with a success rate of 97.5% approximately.

The Internet of Drones paradigm is considered as a key enabler for several cutting edge verticals, including surveillance, planetary exploration, protection, loads transportation, and aerology. The main limitations to its wide-scale adoption arise from the constraints on the resources available onboard of drones: this concerns energy, computational and storage capabilities. Unfortunately, current literature mainly focuses on energy limitations, leaving unexplored the interplay with other constraints. To bridge this gap, the present contribution also encompasses the limitations on the memory onboard, which can be critical when drones have to acquire high resolution multimedia signals for ambient awareness services. In particular, an iterative stochastic approach is conceived hereby to tune data flows from/to drones subject to energy and memory constraints in order to fulfill an Out-of-Service probability below a given threshold. Stemming from the proposed approach, two algorithms have been also designed that seek a different complexity-performance tradeoff. The first one is less complex and more conservative, since it plans the mission once at the beginning. The second, instead, is slightly more complex and aggressive but it allows the drone to gather and upload a higher volume of data and shorten the gap with respect to the ideal case.

In a quite short time after its envisioning, Information Centric Networking paradigm seems to be a standing reality: name-driven primitives have been defined to support networking functionalities and a few architectures have been implemented. In fact, a content consumer can now search for a data item by name and completely disregard its IP address. But the question to raise is: is this searching mechanism really information-centric or is it rather name-centric only? This paper defines the requirements enabling the transition to a paradigm for content exchange which is exclusively based on information. A running example, based on the Web of Data, has been illustrated to describe the key functionalities of the proposed approach. The envisioned solution grounds on a mechanism to embed content in names which, notably, is architecture-agnostic and can run on top of all existing ICN flavors designed so far. This mechanism supports a semantic-based retrieval of content, that returns a list of contents potentially satisfying the consumer, incrementing retrieval precision and recall. The enhancement in terms of recall comes at the cost of a communication overhead, which has been analytically modeled and estimated in this paper.

Complex and interconnected systems belonging to biological, social, economic, and technology application fields are generally described through scale-free topology models. In this context, it is essential to characterize the distribution of shortest paths in order to obtain precious insights on the network behavior. Unfortunately, the few contributions available in the current scientific literature require a case-by-case tuning of model parameters. To bridge this gap, novel Gaussian-based models are proposed hereby, whose parameters can be immediately tuned based on the number of nodes ( $N$ ) composing the network, only. In this way, given $N$ , it becomes possible to predict the distribution of shortest paths without retuning the model for each scenario of interest. The outcomes of the proposed models have been successfully validated and compared with respect to state-of-the-art approaches in a wide set of network topologies. To provide a further insight, the conceived Gaussian-based models have been also evaluated for real Internet topologies, learned from reference data sets. Obtained results highlight that the proposed models are able to reach a good tradeoff between the level of accuracy and complexity, even for real network configurations.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a result of the increased demand to access contents regardless of their location in the network services. This new approach facilitates content distribution as a service of the network with lower delay and higher security in comparison with the current IP network. Applying ICN in current IP infrastructure leads to major complexities. One approach to deploy ICN with less complexity is to integrate ICN with Software Defined Networking (SDN). The SDN controller manages the content distribution, caching, and routing based on the users' requests. In this paper, we extend these context by addressing the ICN topology management problem over the SDN network to achieve an improved user experience as well as network performance. In particular, a centralized controller is designed to construct and manage the ICN overlay. Experimental results indicate that this adopted topology management strategy achieves high performance, in terms of low failure in interest satisfaction and reduced download time compared to a plain ICN.

Information-centric networking (ICN), as a novel network paradigm, is expected to natively support mobility, multicast, and multihoming in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In this paper, the adoption of ICN principles for multimedia streaming in multihomed VANETs is investigated, with a major emphasis on the tradeoff between the quality of experience and energy efficiency (EnE). To formalize this problem, a cost optimization model is first proposed, based on queueing theory arguments. Then, a novel green information-centric multimedia streaming (GrIMS) framework is designed to drive the system toward optimal working points in practical settings. GrIMS consists of three enhanced mechanisms for on-demand cloud-based processing, adaptive multipath transmission, and cooperative in-network caching. Finally, a massive simulation campaign has been carried out, demonstrating that, thanks to its core components, the GrIMS enables flexible multimedia service provisioning and achieves an improved performance in terms of start-up delay, playbacks continuity, and EnE with respect to state-of-the-art solutions.

Latest research in the integration of robotics and Internet of Things (IoT) systems paved the way for the development of new and potentially disruptive technologies, with applications in critical domains such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, smart agriculture and ambient intelligence in general. In this work, a robotic-aided IoT system for the automatic deployment of sensor networks is developed. Specifically, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is used to look for the best suitable deploying positions of the IoT nodes in extensive environments, such as in outdoor settings, based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) value measured between IoT devices. The system exploits accurate robot localization information obtained by integrating odometry, inertial and Global Position System (GPS) measurements. IoT nodes implement an IPv6 protocol, with IEEE 802.15.4 (6TiSCH) technology and make use of multi-hop communications, so as to guarantee an IoT network topology that provides wide coverage. Experimental results carried out in a real outdoor context are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the system. It is shown that compared to a manual deployment, the proposed robotic-aided approach leads to higher performance, thus increasing communication efficiency between nodes and attaining stable IoT network topology.

International audience; The information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging paradigm that grounds networking primitives on content names rather than node locators (as in the current Internet). ICN targets seamless mobility, native muticast/multipath support, and content oriented security to better reflect the needs of today users. ICN could greatly improve the efficiency of content delivery also in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN typically provides information centric services: in fact, whenever a mote is queried, the asking user is interested to the information acquired by the sensors on top of that mote rather than establishing a point-to-point remote communication. In this manuscript, without lack of generality, we will focus on a particular type of ICN architecture, known as content centric networking (CCN). In such a context, we place our attention on the energy efficiency of forwarding, which is achieved via costly broadcasting. Our objective is to save energy while achieving a high user satisfaction rate. In CCN, when a node requests a content, it sends an interest message and the node with the corresponding content replies with a Content Object message. To enable CCN features, each node maintains three tables: a Content Store to cache contents; a Forwarding Interest Base to store forwarded interests and a Pending Interest Table (PIT) to record unsatisfied interests. In this work, we start by introducing the features of CCN in WSNs and the advantages that it brings. For the forwarding optimization, we come up with an ‘Adaptive and fully Distributed Duty-Cycle for Content-Centric Wireless Sensor Network’ (ADDC-CCWSN) mechanism. ADDC-CCWSN aims to reduce the activity of nodes with a high percentage of unsatisfied interests in their PIT. We argue that the approach can be applied (with some modifications) to any ICN architecture that works as a network of caches in pull mode. We also propose an analytical model for CCN-WSNs to examine the energy consumption of content delivery. In addition, we implement the proposed mechanism on Contiki and, through extensive simulations with Cooja, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant gain of energy efficiency compared to a CCN approach with mostly-on sensor nodes while ensuring a high interest satisfaction rate and keeping nearly the same delay.

This letter focuses on a diffusion-based molecular communication system, fed by a nanoscale energy-harvesting mechanism, and conceives a power control mechanism based on feedback control theory. Specifically, the load current drained by the transmitter interface is set proportionally to the available energy harvested from the environment by using a closed-loop control scheme. The resulting system is analytically described through a nonlinear state equation, that jointly considers harvesting and discharging processes. Its asymptotic stability is evaluated around the equilibrium point, while considering some technological constraints. Finally, a numerical example is discussed to clearly show the behavior of the proposed approach in conceivable scenarios.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an emerging network architecture that leverages bidirectional communications between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and a ground infrastructures. Given its versatility, the IoD is a key enabler for the evolution of sophisticated verticals, thus including Smart Cities, Industry 4.0 and Smart Transportation, to name a few. As a matter of fact, a swarm of drones can carry out real-time data gathering, industrial plants monitoring and wide area surveying. Since drones are battery-supplied systems, energy efficiency, communication reliability, and flight formation management routines become critical aspects of the IoD design. This work discusses the communication facets in a swarm of drones, leveraging the joint adoption of Bluetooth and Millimeter-Wave technologies. The proposal enables the exchange of heterogeneous data with a ground infrastructure while facilitating coordinated flight of the swarm. The resulting dual mode system optimizes energy resources, while maximizing reliability and effectiveness of drones’ communications.

The continuous spreading of innovative applications and services, based on the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, leads to the need of even more efficient network architectures/infrastructures, in order to support the huge amount of information to be transmitted in real-time. Hence, new protocols and mechanisms must be conceived to allow the IoT network to be more reactive towards environmental changes and in promptly satisfying the IoT users’ requests. Aiming at dealing with the emerged issues, the paper presents an efficient IoT platform, which, thanks to fog computing principles, acts as a middleware layer between data producers and consumers; it adopts a security-aware publish&subscribe protocol, based on MQTT, coupled with a network of brokers, for efficiently sharing the processed information with end-users. Transmitted data are kept secure under an enforcement framework based on sticky policies. A test campaign is conducted on a prototypical implementation of the just mentioned platform, for preliminary evaluating its efficiency, in terms of computing effort and latency.

During the last decade, the research on nanotechnology and wireless communications in the terahertz band supported the design of pioneering biomedical applications. To counteract the very scarce amount of energy available for nano-devices, a current challenge is to develop energy-aware and energy harvesting mechanisms enabling long-lasting communications at the nanoscale. Many contributions in this direction envisage exploiting piezoelectric nanogenerators to retrieve energy from external vibrations (i.e., the human heartbeat) and use it for transmission purposes. Indeed, in line with the recent scientific achievements in this context, this paper investigates a power control mechanism based on the feedback control theory. The control law is conceived for managing the communication in human tissues, where nano-devices are equipped with a piezoelectric nanogenerator and transmit information messages through electromagnetic waves in the terahertz band. The amount of energy spent to transmit an information message is dynamically tuned by a proportional controller in a closed-loop control scheme which simultaneously considers harvesting and discharging processes. The whole system is analytically described with a nonlinear state equation. As well, it is presented the acceptable range of values of the proportional gain guaranteeing technological constraints and its asymptotic stability. Finally, a numerical evaluation shows the behavior of the proposed approach in a conceivable biomedical scenario.

A narrow-band system introduced in Release 13 of 3GPP has recently gain momentum to support a range of IoT use-cases. Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) comes with low-cost devices characterized by extremely low power consumption, offering a battery life of more than 10 years, and broad radio coverage to target tens of kilometers, but on the cost of low data rate and higher end-to-end latency. NB-IoT can be deployed in three different modes of operation; stand-alone, in-band, and within the guard-band of existing LTE carrier. In this paper, a hybrid network model embracing both NB-IoT and D2D technologies has been introduced. we first present an analytical framework to derive analytical rate expressions for D2D in NB-IoT networks. Then, the performance gains of network model are investigated through numerical evaluations that demonstrate the superiority of proposed model over the traditional NB-IoT network.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative technology that aims to improve the network control, while providing an improved usage of virtual resources deployed across modern networks. Recently, telco operators started to adapt the SDN technology in their transport networks, thus boosting the research activities around the Transport-SDN (T-SDN) paradigm. The integration of SDN in transportation networks, however, poses numerous challenges related to the design of efficient routing approaches, working in large-scale and distributed networks. In this context, this paper investigates the design issues addressed by the current scientific literature and provides a cross-comparison of routing techniques published during recent years. The analysis of key features and drawbacks characterizing the reviewed methodologies reveals the lack of routing strategies that could ensure both energy effectiveness and better bandwidth requirements also known as quality of service in a real-time scenario, which is the primary requirement of the modern large-scale telecommunication networks.

Telecom operators recently started to integrate Software-Defined Networking facilities for controlling and managing their optical transport networks. Here, the management of forwarding rules into the resulting Transport Software-Defined Networking (T-SDN) architecture has to be addressed by taking into account the energy and quality of service requirements. While the most of works in the literature studied these aspects separately, the few contributions that simultaneously take care of energy and quality of service requirements present latency, scalability, or control communication issues. Starting from these considerations, this paper formulates a novel methodology for the dynamic and reactive management of forwarding rules in a (potentially large-scale) T-SDN network, based on the knowledge of network topology, the power consumption of optical switches, the expected volume of traffic, and the variability of the actual traffic load. First, the expected volume of traffic and the estimated power consumption of optical switches are exploited to select the minimum number of nodes and transport links to activate, which enable the communication among any source and destination pairs declared within a given traffic matrix. Then, the bandwidth consumption of activated transport links is periodically monitored by a centralized controller and, in case of congestion, a new set of optical switches and transport links are quickly turned on for addressing the growth of the traffic load. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been investigated through experimental tests and compared against another reference scheme which considers the energy issue only. Obtained results demonstrate its ability to offer higher levels of quality of service to end-users, at the expense of a limited decrease of the registered energy-saving.

Smart mobility embraces many services that require the exchange of huge amount of data between mobile consumers (e.g., vehicles, drones, smartphones) and fixed producers (e.g., cloud servers). Information Centric Networking emerged more than one decade ago as a suitable approach to build the Future Internet, offering flexible communication primitives for data exchange and native support to mobility. Unfortunately, baseline schemes do not take care of stale forwarding information generated into the core network because of consumer mobility and, as a consequence, it leads to an important waste of bandwidth and a higher energy consumption. An SDN-aided Information-Centric Networking approach has been recently formulated by the same authors of this contribution as a valid solution for the aforementioned issue. This paper further extends these promising research results by evaluating the impact of the amount of energy consumed by intermediary routers. The conducted tests demonstrate the proposed solution effectiveness through computer simulations, by considering different network, mobility, and application scenarios.

The absence of proper infrastructure and rapid change in topological formation makes it challenging to adapt the appropriate clustering scheme for choosing a stable cluster head. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive REsilience Algorithm (AREA) for cluster reformation in VANET that takes into account multiple interrelated metrics including the direction, relative velocity, and inter-nodal distance of the moving vehicles yielding a stable clustering with better life time. Simulation results clearly exhibit the robustness and stability of the proposed algorithm.

A Body Area Nano-NETwork represents a system of biomedical nano-devices that, equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities, can be implanted, ingested, or worn by humans for collecting diagnostic information and tuning medical treatments. The communication among these nano-devices can be enabled by graphene-based nano-antennas, which generate electromagnetic waves in the Terahertz band. However, from a perspective of the electromagnetic field propagation, human tissues generally introduce high losses that significantly impair the communication process, thus limiting communication ranges. In this context, the aim of this contribution is to study the communication capabilities of a Body Area Nano-NETwork, by carefully taking into account the inhomogeneous and disordered structure offered by biological tissues. To this end, the propagation of Pulsed Electric Fields in a stratified media stack made up by stratum corneum, epidermis, dermis, and fat has been carefully modeled. First, electric and magnetic fields, as well as the Poynting vector, have been calculated through an accurate Finite-Difference Time-Domain dispersive modeling based on the fractional derivative operator. Second, path loss and molecular absorption noise temperature have been evaluated. Finally, channel capacity and the related transmission ranges have been estimated by using some baseline physical interfaces. Moreover, the comparison with respect to reference values already available in the literature is presented too. Obtained results clearly highlight that new research efforts are needed to ensure the considered communications due to the severe impairment suffered by electromagnetic waves.

Thanks to the availability of miniaturized camera and microphones, nowadays Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) can sense and deliver audio/video signals from a target environment to remote analysis sites. Hence, new opportunity are disclosed for advanced applications in health care, surveillance, military, and traffic monitoring domains, to name a few. But, at the same time, due to the high volume of multimedia streams and the richness of information they bring, WMSNs incur critical issues in terms of congestion control, privacy, and security. These problems can be solved separately by adopting consolidated solutions conceived to address each of them. But one of the pivotal point of optimization in a Wireless Sensor Network is the possibility of exploiting a cross layer design. To bridge this gap, an integrated solution is proposed hereby, namely Secure Selective Dropping Congestion Control $$(\hbox {S}^{2}\hbox {DCC})$$ , based on end-to-end ciphering, in-network selective data dropping, scalable multimedia encoding, and hierarchical and hybrid network design. Moreover, an open source implementation of $$\hbox {S}^{2}\hbox {DCC}$$ has been developed in the Castalia simulator. The main outcomes of the performance evaluation show that $$\hbox {S}^{2}\hbox {DCC}$$ is able to meet data security and privacy requirements and to improve the quality of the received images at the sink with respect to state of the art solutions.

Interoperability, flexibility, and adaptability are key requirements of future internet applications. Convergence of contents, services, things, and networks can be the cornerstone to fulfill these requirements. Such rich and composite sources of data and processing capabilities call for a structured and formal approach that manages and capitalizes heterogeneous information. This paper proposes an approach to the run-time composition of software system architectures, aimed at addressing goals revealed at runtime. The approach is grounded on a graph model characterized by two control levels: a metamodeling and an instantiation level. At metamodeling level, the graph describes facts that may occur in a scenario of interest, processes triggered by facts, and technologies available to execute processes. The actual occurrence of facts, together with the deriving processes and technologies, is managed at instantiation level, with reference to an application-specific model. In particular, the paper proposes an algorithm that determines an optimal way to manage a change in the run-time environment, by finding a minimum cost path in the model. The usefulness of the proposed approach and its applicability to actual scenarios have been validated in an example smart home environment.

Research interest on Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been sharply growing. Although new architectures, algorithms, and analytical models have been proposed, their evaluation remains often isolated and not rigorously verified by the research community. This paper initially portrays the composition of open source software tools available for ICN, certifying the predominance of Content Centric Networking (CCN)/Named Data Networking (NDN) simulators. Then, inspired by similar works related to the P2P field, it surveys related research papers to qualify the ICN literature produced so far, finding that a large fraction of contributions either uses custom, proprietary, and unavailable software, or even plainly fails to mention any information in this regard. By adopting a rigorous methodology, in the second part of the paper four simulators, namely ndnSIM, ccnSim, CCNPL-Sim, and Icarus, are cross-compared under several key aspects. Our findings confirm both their accuracy with respect to reference theoretical models in simple settings, and their consistency in more complex scenario. Additionally, our analysis can both assist researchers in the choice of the tool that best fits their needs, and provide guidelines to avoid common pitfalls in the ICN performance evaluation.

The relentless growth of the human population over the time is driving an exceptional rise in food demand. Improving the efficiency of farming processes is the only way to face the so called Malthusian catastrophe. This objective could be pursued by automating production processes in farms. Robots can play a key role in this context, especially when they can execute tasks on collaborative basis. At the same time, low latency communication capabilities are required to translate in reality the robotic-aided smart agriculture vision. This contribution explores the interplay of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) as enabling drivers for technology spread in the agriculture domain, based on Industry 4.0 principles. In particular, some key performance indicators have been investigated for a rural-area scenario, exploring different technological configurations.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) represents a key enabling paradigm for the Internet of Mobile Things. By offering smart interactions among unmanned aerial vehicles, i.e., drones, it promises to support many advanced services, spanning from control signaling and traffic management to real-time applications and multimedia streaming. From a networking perspective, IoD should face heterogeneous architectures and extremely dynamics topologies, while ensuring the different levels of quality of service expected for the enabled applications. In this context, the definition of novel communication protocols and algorithms must be properly supported by valid instruments able to model the overall network architecture, as well as to evaluate and improve its performance. To meet these goals, this work proposes an open source and system-level simulator for the IoD. Developed on top of the well-known Network Simulator 3, it implements the key networking elements (drones, network access points, and Zone Service Provider), a standard-compliant communication stack based on the IEEE 802.11 technology, and scenarios with various mobility model. Thanks to its native modularity, the simulator is ready to be used for investigating the performance of customizable scenarios with a variable number of drones, and can be easily extended with new functionalities.

The many fold capacity magnification promised by 5G vehicular networks will likely provide massive multimedia services, including infotainment, augmented reality, location services, etc. However, the large-scale and stochastic characteristic of these burgeoning multimedia applications will lead to an exponential increase of traffic in vehicular networks. Meanwhile, the diversified requirements introduced by the coexistence with traditional services will also bring new challenges to the efficient usage of resources. To cope with the above challenges, we propose a novel Stochastic Optimization framework for Pricing-aware Multimedia Services (SOPMS) in this paper, which targets the maximization of utility with the constraints of system stability and traffic pricing policy. Specifically, we leverage the Lyapunov function to address this optimization objective, which is decomposed into three tractable subproblems. For each problem, a distinct algorithm is conceived, i.e. Quality of Experience (QoE) based utility maximization, cooperative resource allocation and pricing-based transmission control. Finally, validated by the simulations, our proposed SOPMS preserves the optimality and significantly improves the queue stability and service utility, in comparison with other state-of-the-art solutions.

Detecting disruptive events, such as earthquakes, using environmental monitoring systems is a particularly promising, but rather challenging, opportunity. The Internet of Things (IoT) can play a significant role in characterizing and predicting seismic events. The present contribution introduces QuakeSense, an open-source earthquake and weather monitoring system. The implemented IoT system is configured as a Long Range (LoRa)-based star topology with a fully energy-autonomous sensor node. The system leverages some of the most useful features of two emerging IoT technologies, e.g., LoRa and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and enables the near real-time monitoring of seismic events through a web-based interface. An experimental campaign has been carried out to verify the current consumption and, therefore, the battery lifetime of the sensor node. Moreover, LoRa parameters have been extensively tested as to evaluate performances in several configurations. The obtained results in terms of latency and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) demonstrated the reliability of the proposal.

The automated setup of Internet of things (IoT) systems in industrial environments is an open challenge at the forefront of networking and robotics domains. In this study, a robotic-aided deployment system is proposed and experimentally tested with reference to the Internet protocol version 6 technology. To this end, a design methodology has been conceived to attain the setup of a fully connected time-slotted channel hopping network in a target area, based on the measured received signal strength indication of wireless links, required spatial sensing resolution, and number of available IoT nodes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, an experimental test bed has been set up, consisting of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that automatically deploys an IoT network in a laboratory environment. Experimental results clearly show that the UGV is able to deploy a fully connected 6TiSCH network that match spatial resolution requirements, highlighting how the proposed policy affects the position of IoT nodes release points.

Exploiting the advantages brought by long-range radio communications and extremely low power consumptions, LoRaWAN is capable to support low rate industry 4.0 services. Despite being energy efficient, LoRa motes can still undergo frequent battery replenishments caused by the monitoring requirements of industrial applications. Duty-cycle constrained operations can partially face this issue at the expense of increased communication delays, which, in turn, inflate higher costs due to damaged products on the production line. This letter proposes a model to analyze this cost tradeoff against different sensing intervals. It further highlights the impact of energy harvesting sources on this cost relationship mapping a way toward improved production efficiency.

This work presents a novel information-centric communication bus for Intelligent Transportation Systems, namely BONVOYAGE Communication System. Based on the Internames principle (i.e., an evolution of the well-known Information-Centric Networking paradigm), it offers a scalable and distributed dissemination of real-time contents through standardized interfaces, request-response and publish-subscribe schema, while ensuring interoperability across borders. To prove its suitability in real scenarios, the main functionalities of the BONVOYAGE Communication System (including namespace, data processing, and caching) have been properly designed and characterized in order to effectively disseminate travel-centric data (i.e. contents of interest of Intelligent Transportation Systems) formatted according to DATEX II specifications. Experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms baseline dissemination mechanisms in terms of processing complexity, communication latencies, and bandwidth consumption.

Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a recent enhancement of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard aimed at the industrial sector. To complement its unique features, the IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6tisch) Working Group released a set of specifications that define the way Time Slotted Channel Hopping could be integrated in embedded IPv6 networks based on the IPv6 over Low Power WPAN. TheI 6tisch standard is now available under several hardware/software platforms so that a cross-comparison of the different implementations deserves particular attention in order to properly identify performance bottlenecks and scavenge pros and cons of the 6tisch technology. The present contribution provides an experimental cross-comparison of protocol stack implementations running on top of different devices. In particular, experimental tests were conducted to characterize the behavior of OpenWSN and Contiki in Time Slotted Channel Hopping- based scenarios made up by TelosB, Zolertia Z1, and OpenMote motes. By considering star and chain topologies and different traffic load conditions, many performance indices were measured, including memory footprint, energy consumption, synchronization time, duty- cycle, end-to-end packet delays, and Packet Loss Ratio. Obtained results highlight strengths and weaknesses of each hardware/software platform, while providing trade-off considerations about flexibility, accuracy, energy-efficiency, and Quality of Service.

International audience; Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been recognized as a promising communication technology for smart grid monitoring and control applications. However, the deployment of WSNs in smart grid brought new challenges that pertain to the harsh electrical grid nature, and the different and often contradicting communication requirements of smart grid monitoring applications. MAC protocols play a crucial role to meet the reliability and latency requirements of WSN-based smart grid communications. In particular, the IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), the latest generation of low-power and highly reliable MAC protocols, orchestrates the medium access according to a time-frequency communication schedule. However, TSCH specification does not provide any practical solution for the establishment of the schedule. Orchestra is a recent scheduling solution for TSCH that brings significant advantages such as, the use of simple scheduling rules, the low signaling overhead, and the high delivery ratio. Despite its unique features, Orchestra has the limitation of computing the TSCH schedule at each node independently from its traffic load, which can drastically affect the communication delay. This limitation makes Orchestra not sufficiently convenient for several delay-sensitive smart grid applications. Further, the current TSCH specification does not support traffic differentiation (i.e. handle all packets equally regardless of their criticality levels). In this paper, we propose an enhanced Orchestra-based TSCH protocol, called e-TSCH-Orch, that dynamically adjusts time slots assignment according to traffic load and criticality level. The performance analysis of e-TSCH-Orch shows that it significantly reduces the communication delay compared to the original Orchestra-based TSCH, while preserving the low signaling overhead and the high packet delivery ratio.

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are a prominent feature of 5G systems, introduced to provide a native support to distributed services in mobile environments. D2D technologies enable straight interactions between mobile terminals without a compulsory involvement of base stations. In this manuscript, we study and propose an optimized caching strategy to content distribution on top of D2D technology, based on Information Centric Networking (ICN) principles. The rationale is that ICN architectures can provide seamless support to mobile services and decouple contents from node identifiers, thus providing a promising match with D2D requirements. To this end, a novel fluid-based model in proposed hereby that catches the interplay between ICN functionalities, D2D requirements, and 5G specifications. Then, based on this model, an optimal content replication problem is formulated, encompassing caching overhead and system load. Additionally, this problem is thoroughly analyzed to prove that it has an optimal solution with time threshold form. A practical algorithm $\varsigma ^*$ -OCP is further proposed in order to implement the optimal caching control in realistic environments. Finally, a massive simulation campaign is carried out to test the proposed algorithm in comparison to state-of-the-art solutions.

Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) are gaining momentum within Internet of Things circles, thanks to their inherent capabilities to simplify network topologies and increase coverage in low-rate and low-power communications. This study focuses on a specific LPWAN technology, namely Long Range Wireless Area Network (LoRaWAN), which is being widely investigated by the research community worldwide. LoRaWAN offers many noticeable features, including wide coverage areas, security by design, power consumption and bandwidth optimisation, and a high degree of flexibility and reconfigurability. Unfortunately, in spite of these valuable characteristics, LoRaWAN appliances are often closed source and proprietary. To bridge the gap, this study proposes a prototype, which has been designed and set up using open low-cost experimental boards and programming tools, only. Moreover, an experimental campaign has been carried out in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed platform.

Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) Medium Access Control (MAC) is a key feature of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, aimed at accommodating the requirements of industrial Internet of Things systems. Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) is a main pillar of TSCH, on top of which frequency hopping is added to increase the resilience of short range radio links. A tight synchronization among the network nodes is required in TSCH. Luckily, once a node joins the network, several lean techniques can be used to keep alive its synchronization. On contrary, the subtleties of the joining phase in TSCH still deserve investigations since they could hinder an effective usage of the TSCH MAC. To this end, the problem of acquiring the first synchronization in a TSCH network is investigated hereby, from several perspectives: (i) four novel mechanisms are proposed and implemented in real motes to speed up joining operations; (ii) their average joining time is analytically modeled with closed form expressions as a function of node density, communication reliability, and beacon transmission frequency; (iii) their effectiveness and the agreement between experimental and theoretical outcomes are evaluated in several scenarios.

This paper focuses on Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) and sheds some light on the feasibility of fully cable-less Internet of Things deployments, where dual-radio gateways are fed by a photovoltaic plant and equipped with a wireless backhaul. As a first step, the power needs of a dual-radio gateway, serving a mix of realistic machine-to-machine applications and leveraging different combinations of front-end chipsets and backhaul wireless technologies, are investigated. Then, the achieved results are properly employed to size the PV plant, as well as to estimate its installation costs and land acquisition. Finally, cost-saving and carbon footprints analysis is presented to demonstrate the socio-economic benefits arising out of these cable-less deployments for LoRaWANs. The conducted study clearly exhibits that network operators can achieve their break-even point during the early stages after the deployment, while adopting environment-friendly approaches because of carbon emission savings achieved by renewable energy.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a key pillar in various smart-* domains, including smart home, smart building, intelligent transportation systems, industrial Internet, to name a few. Its potential in terms of value creation is extraordinary, according to economic estimates from many market sectors. At the same time, there are some technical challenges to face, which could refrain IoT adoption. In this study, the attention is focused on interoperability and data quality issues from a pragmatic standpoint. In particular, a real smart building testbed has been set-up by integrating two different IoT platforms: TLSensing and NetwOrked Smart Object (NOS). The former has been developed to enable the quick deployment of a IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6tisch) IoT network and to expose the data gathered from sensors through a web interface. The latter is a middleware that handles heterogeneous data sources and offers a unifying view to users. The resulting IoT system is able to: (i) gather data from multiple sources, including multimedia ones; (ii) expose network resources to user through a common interface; (iii) enforce security and data quality checks. The performance of this system has been experimentally analyzed to demonstrate a satisfactory responsiveness and ability to meet the aforementioned requirements.

Cyber foraging techniques have been proposed in edge computing to support resource-intensive and latency-sensitive mobile applications. In a natural or man-made disaster scenario, all cyber foraging challenges are exacerbated by two problems: edge nodes are scarce and hence easily overloaded and failures are common due to the ad-hoc hostile conditions. In this paper, we study the use of efficient load profiling and migration strategies to mitigate such problems. In particular, we propose FORMICA, an architecture for cyber foraging orchestration, whose goal is to minimize the completion time of a set of jobs offloaded from mobile devices. Existing service offloading solutions are mainly concerned with outsourcing a job out of the mobile responsibility. Our architecture supports both mobile-based offloading and backend-driven onloading i.e., the offloading decision is taken by the edge infrastructure and not by the mobile node. FORMICA leverages Gelenbe networks to estimate the load profile of each node of the edge computing infrastructure to make proactive load profiling decisions. Our evaluation on a proof-of-concept implementation shows the benefits of our policy-based architecture in several (challenged disaster) scenarios but its applicability is broad to other IoT-based latency-sensitive applications.

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are broadly used to set up distributed monitoring infrastructures in self-healing, self-configuring, and self-managing systems. They are composed by many elementary devices (or motes) equipped with basic sensing, computing, and communications capabilities, which interact on a collaborative basis to sense a target environment and report collected data to one or more sinks. WSNs are expected to be operational for very long periods of time, even if each mote cannot bring large energy storage units. Accordingly, Energy Harvesting mechanisms can greatly magnify the expected lifetime of WSNs. Over the years, Energy Harvesting-Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSN) have been thoroughly studied by the scientific and industrial communities to bridge the gap from the vision to the reality. A critical facet of EH-WSN lies in the interplay between EH techniques and MAC protocols. In fact, while EH technologies feed motes with energy, the MAC layer is responsible for a significant quota of spent energy because of message transmission/reception and channel sensing operations. In addition, the energy brought by EH technologies is not easily predictable in advance because of time-varying nature: this makes the design of the MAC protocol even more challenging. To draw a comprehensive review of the state of the art on this subject, the present manuscript first provides a detailed analysis on existing energy harvesting systems for WSNs; then it extensively illustrates pros and cons of key MAC protocols for EH-WSNs with a special focus on: fundamental techniques, evaluation approaches, and key performance indicators. Finally, it summarizes lessons learned, provides design guidelines for MAC protocols in EH-WSNs, and outlooks the impact on Internet of Things.

Emerging services for Intelligent Transport Systems put the information content at the centre of the communication process, require a seamless support of mobile users, and target a real-time and asynchronous data dissemination. The Information-Centric Networking paradigm has all the potentials to fulfill these requirements, thanks to its ability to distribute contents through publish-subscribe communication mechanism, also in mobile conditions. Unfortunately, most of publish-subscribe models proposed in the literature consider static scenarios. The work presented herein formulates two publish-subscribe schemes, based on the pull-based and push-based approaches, discusses their behavior through simplified examples, and evaluates the communication overhead they incur in realistic scenarios through computer simulations.

Internet of Things (IoT) is widely recognized as a key enabling driver in environmental monitoring systems, thanks to its inherent capabilities to provide sensing and actuation functionalities on a distributed basis. At the same time, the majority of IoT applications are Information Centric by design: they target specific actions that are not related to any network node but can be provided by multiple resources within the system. In this perspective, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, formulated to answer to Future Internet requirements, can natively and seamlessly support IoT technologies as a service bus. Moving to IoT-enabled environmental monitoring systems, the publish-subscribe data exchange model is the pivotal functionality that ICN architectures have to support. In fact, an environmental monitoring system can be easily set up by letting one or more collecting stations to subscribe to the events or sensed values, generated (i.e., published) by IoT nodes scattered in the scenario of interest. Unfortunately, the support for publish-subscribe functionalities is not uniform across the main ICN architectures designed so far. To shed some light on this issue, the present contribution analyzes to what extent ICN architectures are able to support publish-subscribe and highlights the missing building blocks to purse this objective.

Piezoelectric nanogenerators recently emerged as a turning point in the design of energy-aware and energy harvesting transmission scheme at the nanoscale. This work considers their adoption in diffusion-based molecular communications, proposing a power control strategy based on feedback control theory. In particular, the transmission power of an electrochemical nanodevice fed by a piezoelectric nanogenerator is dynamically set proportionally to the available energy budget, by using a closed-loop control scheme. The resulting system is analytically modeled with a discrete-time nonlinear state equation. The range of acceptable values of the proportional gain is theoretically derived by studying technological constraints and global asymptotic stability. The impact of the proportional gain on both output variance and time constant of the linearized system around the equilibrium point is also investigated. Computer simulations validate the theoretical analysis under different parameter settings. The comparison against state of the art transmission scheme also demonstrates the unique ability of the conceived approach to ensure, at the equilibrium, the targeted performance level.

Methodologies for correct by construction reconfigurations can efficiently solve consistency issues in dynamic software architecture. Graph-based models are appropriate for designing such architectures and methods. At the same time, they may be unfit to characterize a system from a non functional perspective. This stems from efficiency and applicability limitations in handling time-varying characteristics and their related dependencies. In order to lift these restrictions, an extension to graph rewriting systems is proposed herein. The suitability of this approach, as well as the restraints of currently available ones, are illustrated, analysed and experimentally evaluated with reference to a concrete example. This investigation demonstrates that the conceived solution can: (i) express any kind of algebraic dependencies between evolving requirements and properties; (ii) significantly ameliorate the efficiency and scalability of system modifications with respect to classic methodologies; (iii) provide an efficient access to attribute values; (iv) be fruitfully exploited in software management systems; (v) guarantee theoretical properties of a grammar, like its termination. This is an extended abstract for the Models 2015 Conference of the journal paper of the same name [1].

During the last years, the interest in nano-technologies and nanoscale communications significantly growth in several application domains, such as healthcare, bio-medicine, agro-food, industry, and military/defense. Nano-scale devices are able to interact with each others, with existing communication networks and, ultimately, with the Internet. As a result, the well-known Internet of Things paradigm is extending its functionalities at the nano-scale, thus paving the way for the revolutionary Internet of Nano-Things concept, which goes beyond the already diffused “smart things” towards real application of ‘smart nano-things‘”. In this context, many research initiatives are addressing the definition of efficient, secure, scalable, and reliable network architectures at the nano-scale. In order to provide a valuable step ahead of the current state of the art, the work presented herein investigates a novel methodology through which securing an Internet of Nano-Things architecture, by jointly offering the reliability of connected devices and the protection of transmitted data. From the communication perspective, the proposed approach leverages both molecular diffusion and electromagnetic-based communication schema. In such a hybrid approach, parameter settings and message exchange is properly devised to effectively achieve the aforementioned security services. Finally, the impact that security functionalities have on the performance of a reference Internet of Nano-Things scenario (i.e., expressed in terms of packet loss ratio, communication latencies, and message processing overhead) is evaluated through Nano-Sim and N3Sim tools.

The Internet of Things is rapidly diffusing and many standalone platforms have been deployed in different domains. Since these solutions are still isolated, the definition of a globally unified platform embracing different and heterogeneous Internet of Things systems is gaining momentum. In the Internet Research Task Force context, the Information-Centric Networking Research Group envisages the possibility to reach this challenging goal by properly leveraging the communication primitives of the Information-Centric Networking paradigm. In line with this vision, this contribution proposes a concrete solution that offers: name-based communication scheme, flexible data delivery, support for heterogeneous network infrastructures, platform interoperability, and technology-independent implementation of high-level applications. Moreover, a proof-of-concept implementation is presented for further describing the main functionalities of the designed approach and demonstrating its correct execution in a real environment.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) focuses on data dissemination instead of host communication, and it is a promising solution for video streaming in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). In Information-Based VANETs, content copies can be cached by arbitrary mobile nodes in the networks. Thus, it is required to optimize the routing of content requests (referred to as Interest packets) in order to quickly locate potential content providers as soon as possible. This article proposes a Preference-aware Fast Interest Forwarding for video streaming in ICN-based VANETs (PaFF). In PaFF, each mobile user creates a Highly Preferred Content Table (HPCT) to maintain the content caching status of nodes who have similar mobility patterns and video playback behavior. Based on HPCT, a preference-aware forwarder selection mechanism is proposed to select the next hop of Interest packets in order to minimize latencies and maximize reliability. Simulation results show that PaFF achieves a considerable improvement in terms of start-up delay and cache hit ratio while incurring almost the same overhead with respect to state-of-art solutions.

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) services require efficient content dissemination mechanisms based on the publish-subscribe model in static and mobile scenarios. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture can successfully satisfy these requirements. In its native formulation, ICN can fulfill publish-subscribe data dissemination and natively supports mobile applications. At the time of this writing, several ICN-based solutions have been proposed to implement the publish-subscribe model, but none of them is explicitly tailored to mobile scenarios. To bridge this gap, the present contribution: (i) formulates new pull-based and push-based publish-subscribe communication schema, able to support user mobility in ICN networks; (ii) provides analytical models describing the communication overhead they incur, (iii) investigates their accuracy through computer simulations. The conducted study considers well-known benchmark network topologies, real IoT monitoring services, and standardized settings for urban and rural environments. From one side, obtained results validate the conceived analytical models. From another side, they highlight pros and cons of pull-based and push-based approaches by emphasizing the conditions under which one scheme should be preferred to the other one.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) are built considering numerous legal regulations, organisational conditions, and user needs. For this reason, they cannot be sold as plug a play products and their implementation requires a clear definition of functional and technical requirements. The primary objective of ITSs is to improve the efficiency and safety of road traffic. In fact, nowadays, the number of motorways all over Europe is increasing. The road freight transport is also growing. These are one of some reasons of caused accidents. Solution to this problem may be implementation of ITS systems. But, a reliable work of them is possible when their reliability is at a very high level. The aim of this paper is to present a new model of reliability and operation analysis of the selected ITS system which include continuous provision of power to its elements. The article also contains a logical, functional and physical viewpoint of selected ITS system.