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Visible Light Communication paradigm has been expedited by the fast evolving and deployment of light emitting diodes (LED), and the possibility to simultaneously exploit the communication and illumination, enabling seamless connectivity based on the lighting infrastructure. Synchronization is a big deal in all the wireless communication systems and the key features of VLC paradigm make the synchronization techniques existing for RF not suitable for VLC. A novel technique, OSCI-LIGHT based on Andronov-Hopf oscillators, is proposed in this work in order to realize an effective synchronization mechanism in a VLC system. In particular, phase alignment and robustness towards noise have been tested through both numerical simulation and experimental results and a comparison with widely employed synchronization techniques, based on Phase Locked Loop (PLL), has been provided. Experimental results show that our technique outperforms PLL techniques in terms of noise robustness, showing a proper steady state phase delay and a lower Synchronization Error Rate, even in presence of highly noisy environmental conditions.

The heterogeneity of current telecommunication access technologies is dramatically increasing the complexity and costs required for the set-up and maintenance of the network by service providers, and it is also posing important limitations in terms of network interoperability from the end-users' perspectives. For these reasons, research on wireless systems has investigated the possibility to deploy wireless devices with self-organizing and self-managing capabilities. However, most of these approaches limit the re-configuration capabilities to a specific layer (e.g. routing), and do not investigate the property of reconfiguration of the network as a whole. In this paper, we propose an alternative architecture (called STEM-Net) for network infrastructure deployment, extension, and management. In STEM-Net self-organization is managed through fully-reconfigurable wireless devices (called stem-nodes), that can undergo mutations to fulfill a specific tasks, like their biological counterpart. In this work we present the main characteristics of stem-nodes, and we discuss how their evolutionary behaviour can result in an extreme flexibility of the whole network segment, transforming the technological heterogeneity from a limitation to a richness.

[EN] Recent developments in the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) field have made evident the need for a standardization process of the communication technologies supporting direct information exchange, thus enabling UAV-to-UAV networking. We consider this is necessary to achieve all sorts of cooperative tasks requiring real-time (or near-real-time) synchronization, including swarm formation and collision avoidance. In this article, we therefore argue in favor of introducing a new standard that would address this specific area, highlighting why current technologies are not adequate, what the different steps toward rapid standardization are, and which lessons have been learned from related fields, namely the vehicular and robotic environments, in the past few years., This work is derived from R&D project RTI2018-096384-B-I00 funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF A way of making Europe.

This paper assesses the performance of a localization technique for underwater visible light networks. The proposed approach is based on a fingerprinting technique, collecting the channel impulse responses from different wireless optical signals in the visible range. A local database related to the power level distribution within a maritime environment is built and exploited to estimate user position, e.g., a diver moving in a given space for underwater fish monitoring. In this paper, we investigate on the noise effect on the localization accuracy in underwater scenarios and for different water turbidity coefficient and we demonstrate that the estimation error suffers on variable channel impulse responses. Different configuration parameters and environmental scenarios have been considered, showing that the LED transmitter deployment can be effective in the localization estimation. A comparison of the proposed localization approach to the traditional triangulation method has been finally carried out, showing the effectiveness of the fingerprinting-based solution for a lower number of LED transmitters.

International audience; Quantum communications are gaining more and more interest in the research community thanks to the recent advancements in nanotechnology. Indeed, quantum phenomena represent a natural direction for developing nanotechnology. The exploitation of quantum nature of information offers new potential solutions in the field of computing and networking, and extends the communication potentiality to levels that cannot be imagined in classical communication systems. Quantum communications can be realized in different ways. In this paper, we focus on the exploitation of quantum particles and quantum channels, in order to realize a data transmission system by means of phonons. First, we introduce the channel model of a phonon-based quantum system, and then derive the analysis of the error probability associated to such quantum channel. The application scenario is a biological environment, where phonons are exploited as information carriers. We have dealt a numerical evaluation in order to assess the performance of the quantum communication system. In particular, we have derived numerical results in terms of the error probability and the activity time, which represent how effective are phonons for communication purpose. We observe the frequency dependence of both error probability and activity time, thus allowing to tune the frequency for performance optimization.