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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of network softwarization and virtualization technology in the field of telecommunications has opened the door to a radical review of the applications, protocols, and deployment models. In this evolving framework, old assumptions and constraints specific to satellite communications must be carefully re-assessed. To this aim, we revisit the role of the performance enhancing proxy (PEP), replaced by a chain of custom virtual network functions properly enabled to optimize common web traffic performance over a backhaul dynamically enabled with a supplementary satellite link. The resulting virtual PEP (vPEP) is compliant with the breakthrough virtualization and slicing paradigms and can fruitfully exploit the advanced features of the most recent IETF technologies such as QUIC and MPTCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies show how geomorphic descriptors, retrieved from digital elevation models (DEMs), can be used for flood hazard mapping. As they strictly depend on the accuracy of the input DEMs and reference flood hazard maps used for training, DEM-based flood hazard models may display severe inconsistencies. Our study shows the application of two advanced DEM-based models to a large study area, and presents two main innovative points. First, the delicate tasks of appropriately selecting the input DEM and flood hazard map are specifically addressed with newly defined methods. Second, the ability of DEM-based models to exploit their natural features to enhance flood hazard mapping over the study region is investigated. Our results show (a) the benefits of considering multiple geomorphic descriptors, (b) the potential of DEM-based models for completing the information of imperfect reference flood hazard maps, and (c) the advantages of continuous representation of hazard over binary flood maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the next article entitled "A Cautionary Tale for Machine Learning Design: Why We Still Need Human-Assisted Big Data Analysis", the authors present a study with the main goal to increase the accuracy of a Supervised Machine Learning (ML) system in predicting when a water meter would malfunction/need disassembly based on a history of water consumption measurements. The fourth article entitled "Detecting vehicles' relative position on two-lane highways through a smartphone-based video overtaking aid application" presents a smartphone-based real-time video overtaking architecture for vehicular networks. In the presented scenario, ahead vehicles stream a video flow to the vehicle behind aiding the overtaking maneuver. [Extracted from the article]

The number of physical objects connected to the Internet constantly grows and a common thought says the IoT scenario will change the way we live and work. Since IoT technologies have the potential to be pervasive in almost every aspect of a human life, in this paper, we deeply analyze the IoT scenario. First, we describe IoT in simple terms and then we investigate what current technologies can achieve. Our analysis shows four major issues that may limit the use of IoT (i.e., interoperability, security, privacy, and business models) and it highlights possible solutions to solve these problems. Finally, we provide a simulation analysis that emphasizes issues and suggests practical research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the surrounding beauties when visiting a new region. To this aim, we discuss and analyze here PhotoTrip, an interactive tool able to autonomously recommend charming, even if not mainstream, cultural heritage locations along travel itineraries. PhotoTrip is able to identify these points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr and Wikipedia and then provide the user with suggestions and recommendations. An important technical challenge for this kind of services is the ability to provide only the most relevant pictures among the many available for any considered itinerary. To this aim, we have exploited social networks, crowdsourcing and gamification to involve users in the process of improving the response quality of our system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years, ICT use in vehicular technology has expanded very fast. Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) is seen as the natural next step in this evolution whose availability will give rise to the next generation of smart vehicles. As this technology is deployed, a wide range of services varying from safety to entertainment will become factually accessible to passengers. Many of these envisaged services require a one-to-many communication model which demand for intelligent solutions able to propagate the message in areas of the network where it has not been heard before. To this end, we propose an enhancement of an existent optimal message propagation scheme proposed in the context of one dimensional vehicular networks, namely Fast-Broadcast. Our proposal generalizes the former with the objective of guiding message dissemination to an entire area of interest in generic road topologies. Our proposed scheme exploits bloom filter properties to further advance message propagation into the network. We contrast our approach with the original, lightweight state-of-the-art proposal, showing that it fulfills its design objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud-based entertainment is gaining momentum. With the cost of commodity hardware lowering by the day and the consumer market penetration of in-house digital entertainment systems, a new generation of interactive services has come into being. This new technological wave has launched new content producers and providers that are rapidly adapting to match the consumer demand. In this context, thin client or cloud-based gaming is attracting much attention, shifting the computational burden to the cloud while the consumer enjoys a fat video feed accessed through its thin client via the shared wireless gateway. However, this model of interaction raises new challenges that demand for specific networking solutions aimed at addressing the heterogeneous flow coexistence problem at the home wireless gateway. We propose a solution to this problem by devising a Transmission Control Protocol Vegas-like congestion control algorithm deployed on top of the home gateway. Our solution works out of the box with the standard protocols at the server, router, and client levels, thereby making deployment straightforward. Experimental assessment with real traffic traces shows that our solution addresses the problem effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever increasing pace of IoT deployment is opening the door to concrete implementations of smart city applications, enabling the large-scale sensing and modeling of (near-)real-time digital replicas of physical processes and environments. This digital replica could serve as the basis of a decision support system, providing insights into possible optimizations of resources in a smart city scenario. In this article, we discuss an extension of a prior work, presenting a detailed proof-of-concept implementation of a Digital Twin solution for the Urban Facility Management (UFM) process. The Interactive Planning Platform for City District Adaptive Maintenance Operations (IPPODAMO) is a distributed geographical system, fed with and ingesting heterogeneous data sources originating from different urban data providers. The data are subject to continuous refinements and algorithmic processes, used to quantify and build synthetic indexes measuring the activity level inside an area of interest. IPPODAMO takes into account potential interference from other stakeholders in the urban environment, enabling the informed scheduling of operations, aimed at minimizing interference and the costs of operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks and mobile ad hoc networks share many key characteristics such as self-organization and decentralization; they also face the crucial challenge of providing connectivity in a decentralized, dynamic environment. However, when considering ad hoc networks composed of mobile devices such as smartphones, we cannot rely on the continuous end-to-end path between peers as for classic Internet P2P applications; rather, we have to deal with low node density that creates mobile-disconnected networks. Porting the P2P paradigm into mobile networks to create a mobile-to-mobile file sharing application will create a modern type of delay/disruption tolerant network. In this context, we discuss our new approach for P2P file sharing that considers networks composed of mobile smartphones. As an innovative feature, we leverage on peer mobility to reach data in other disconnected networks by implementing a delay/disruption tolerant network-like store-delegate-and-forward communication model, where a peer can delegate unaccomplished file download tasks to other peers. In order to increase the chances of eventually receiving the requested file while reducing the number of transmitted messages and data, social awareness is exploited by nodes to delegate unaccomplished tasks only to peers that are expected to be encountered again in the future. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flying ad-hoc networks are becoming a promising solution for different application scenarios involving unmanned aerial vehicles, like urban surveillance or search and rescue missions. However, such networks present various and very specific communication issues. As a consequence, there are several research studies focused on analyzing their performance via simulation. Correctly modeling mobility is crucial in this context and although many mobility models are already available to reproduce the behavior of mobile nodes in an ad-hoc network, most of these models cannot be used to reliably simulate the motion of unmanned aerial vehicles. In this article, we list the existing mobility models and provide guidance to understand whether they could be actually adopted depending on the specific flying ad-hoc network application scenarios, while discussing their advantages and disadvantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are still in the midst of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), with more manufacturing lines being labeled as smart thanks to the integration of advanced ICT in Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS). While I4.0 aims to provision cognitive CPS systems, the nascent Industry 5.0 (I5.0) era goes a step beyond, aiming to build cross-border, sustainable, and circular value chains benefiting society as a whole. An enabler of this vision is the integration of data and AI in the industrial decision-making process, which does not exhibit yet a coordination between the Operation and Information Technology domains (OT/IT). This work proposes an architectural approach and an accompanying software prototype addressing the OT/IT convergence problem. The approach is based on a two-layered middleware solution, where each layer aims to better serve the specific differentiated requirements of the OT and IT layers. The proposal is validated in a real testbed, employing actual machine data, showing the capacity of the components to gracefully scale and serve increasing data volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first article, titled "Smart Campus: fostering the community awareness through an intelligent environment" presents a case study where IoT technologies have been used to design and develop a system able to bring benefit to communities of students, making them actively involved as central players of such an intelligent environment. The third article titled "A low-cost and low-power messaging system based on the LoRa wireless technology" described a low-cost and low-power consumption messaging system based on LoRa technology. The fourth article titled "An Online Education System to Produce and Distribute Video Lectures" focused on online learning and the authors shared their experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. [Extracted from the article]