Future Access Enablers for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Infrastructures

The flexibility of cloud computing has afforded users the ability to develop and deploy fully customizable cloud-based applications and services. Thus far, this flexibility has primarily been constrained to the likes of x86 servers and storage devices. The SAVI application platform testbed was developed to realize the hypothesis that all physical infrastructure resources can be virtualized. Key to this work is a novel control and management framework based on Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI), a concept which provides a unified programmable interface over heterogeneous infrastructures. In this paper, we present the architecture of the Canadian SAVI national testbed based on the SDI framework. The design of an autonomous SAVI node will be described and the multi-node deployment that comprise the national testbed will be discussed. In addition, the orchestration of applications across the multi-node testbed will be described. Lastly, we will report on the progress of our recent efforts to federate the SAVI testbed with the American GENI national testbed.

Managing computational resources and networking elements over today’s heterogeneous infrastructure has become very challenging. A need for virtualizing network functions has emerged to reduce infrastructure operating costs. In this paper we consider using software-defined infrastructure (SDI) resource management system (RMS) to achieve service chaining of virtualized network functions (VNFs). SDI allows for the integrated control and management of heterogenous resources. In an SDI environment, the end user has access to interfaces that allow programmatic management of the resources. The user can define their own service graph (SG), which determines the path that traffic must take through various VNFs. The ability to dynamically realize the SG is what is referred to by service chaining. Use cases of service chaining include adding a firewall in front of web server and multicasting. Furthermore, we tested the firewall use case in two scenarios to verify validity of our service chaining implementation.

As cloud computing technologies continue to develop and evolve, cloud infrastructure has become heterogeneous and multi-tiered. A new demand in cloud computing is to provide cloud functionalities at the customer premise to support customer needs. This demand is addressed in this paper by providing virtual Customers Premise Edge (vCPE) as a third tier of the SAVI Testbed, which is a platform established for experimentation of future applications. A smart room monitoring use case is used to demonstrate the functionalities and efficiency of the vCPE in the SAVI Testbed.

This paper presents CVST, an open scalable platform for smart transportation application development. CVST resources can be elastically scaled up/down, or scaled out to robustly adjust to the varying demands on CVST portal. CVST provides APIs to access all live and historical transportation data as well as analytics and algorithmic engines that are provisioned within the platform. Third party application developers and researchers can create their own space in the CVST cloud environment and build their applications.

5G is envisioned to support unprecedented diverse applications and services with extremely heterogeneous performance requirements, i.e., mission critical IoT communication, massive machine-type communication and Gigabit mobile connectivity. This imposes enormous challenges to fulfil the key performance requirements, in particular, mission critical IoT communication, which calls for a dramatic paradigm change in 5G. This paper presents vision and challenges of mission critical IoT scenarios and the enabling technologies in 5G. Several research opportunities are given as example for inspiration purpose.

This paper focuses on the role played by in-band full-duplex in asynchronous random access networks. With an eye on 5G, we tackle a scenario characterised by a large population of uncoordinated users exchanging sporadic traffic in the form of short data packets. In this context, we introduce an analytical framework based on stochastic geometry that captures the tradeoffs induced by the presence of some full-duplex links. Via closed-form expressions, we study the behaviour of the system as a function of the packet length, and derive the optimal fraction of full-duplex communications that shall be performed to maximise the network throughput. The role of imperfect self-interference cancellation is accurately accounted for, drawing interesting insights on the benefits, the design tradeoffs and the challenges to be solved when applying full duplex to machine type communications.

The last years have seen the widespread diffusion of novel Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, which are gaining momentum and commercial interest as enabling technologies for the Internet of Things. In this paper we discuss some of the most interesting LPWAN solutions, focusing in particular on LoRa™, one of the last born and most promising technologies for the wide-area IoT.

The heterogeneity in cellular networks that comprise multiple base stations’ types imposes new challenges in network planning and deployment. The Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques, such as dynamic sharing of the available resources and advanced user association strategies determine the overall network capacity and efficiency. This paper evaluates the downlink performance of a two-tier heterogeneous LTE network (consisting of macro and femto tiers) in terms of rate distribution, i.e. the percentage of users that achieve certain rate in the system. The paper specifically addresses the femto tier RRM by randomization of the allocated resources (1) and the user association process by introducing novel proactive offloading scheme (2). System level simulation results show that the proposed proactive offloading scheme in the association phase improves the performance of congested networks by efficiently utilizing the available femto tier resources.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technology will play a prominent role in home care when the 65 and older age group doubles to 40 % of the US & EU population by 2050. Driven by these ongoing demographical and social changes in these countries, there is a huge interest in IT-based technologies and services that will enable independent living of people with specific needs. AAL offers a solution for caring for this section of the population both efficacious and cost-effective. In order to pave the way towards adequate AAL system architecture and overall software solution approaches, this paper will (i) briefly present architectural styles of AAL systems with some of the problems they face, (ii) describe service bricks architecture of AAL project eWALL and, (iii) discuss the software technologies used to solve some of the common problems of such systems.

Home automation technologies have emerged more than four decades ago, but are undeniably a current subject of interest. Existing systems are usually highly customized, therefore expensive or very sophisticated and complicated, most of which requiring dedicated network cabling. The present paper presents a system for monitoring and control of an ordinary house in a simple and inexpensive manner. The ZigBee protocol is chosen so as to provide a reliable and secure wireless communication without additional cabling required. The data is transmitted to a computer that records and monitors any eventual threshold crossings. The control part is represented by simple means of acting upon an LED, based on data collected from the sensor network and processed accordingly.

The main purpose of the research conducted in this field is to improve senior’s Quality of Life using remote monitoring systems. One of the main problems of these remote systems is the sensitive personal/medical data security. As in different field of e-Health, like telemedicine, where a high data rate is requested, OFDM systems represent a suitable candidate for these areas. This paper focus is to analyze the probability of intercept (POI) for OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) communication systems. A number of measurements are performed using a WiMAX communication signal. The measurements were conducted using two broadband spectrum analyzers and the conclusions are that the POI, for these systems, is proportional with the number of parallel receiver channels and the scanning speed of the receivers.

Human presence in the vicinity of a wireless link causes variations in the link’s Received Signal Strength (RSS). Device-free Localization (DfL) systems use these RSS variations in a static Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to detect and locate people in the area of the network. The main advantage of this emerging technique is localization of people without requiring them to carry any devices. This paper investigates the feasibility of a DfL system using a Sun SPOT WSN. The system uses 16 Sun SPOT sensors and covers 4 × 4 m square area, which is a size of a typical living room. The sensors exchange testing messages, measure RSSs and forward the results to a host computer via a base station. The host application processes the received RSS values using the Radio Tomographic Imaging (RTI) technique and displays a real-time image with the estimated position of the person in the monitored area.

Cloud-based smart homes for ambient assisted living are emerging information and communication technology aiming to facilitate and improve users’ lives. The design of home sensing architecture and corresponding device gateway to connect different types of perceptual and automation devices with cloud services and applications is a challenging task. This paper presents a conceptual home sensing architecture and a modular device gateway design able to combine multiple sources and clients of perceptual and actuator devices providing the required interoperability, flexibility and extensibility for such applications. Furthermore, the paper presents a home sensing environment prototype, which adopts the proposed device gateway design. The proposed design and implementation can be used in a variety of smart-home applications.

Body Area Networks (BAN) have received significant attention in recent years and have found a wide range of applications, including wearable devices for fitness and health tracking, mobile communications, among others. Energy storage devices such as batteries continue to be a bottleneck in these small form factor devices, thus requiring advanced power management techniques to sustain devices’ increasing power and lifetime demands. As radio transceivers are typically the most power hungry subsystem in wearable sensors devices, many techniques focus to reduce the communication power consumption. In this work, we focus on wake-up radios as a novel technology which can be in listening mode consuming only few nW, significantly reducing the overall power consumption of communication. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art wake-up receivers (WUR) in the BAN context, and the tradeoffs between its addressing capabilities, range, and sensitivity. Using in-field measurements, we quantify energy savings and estimate the resulting prolongation of the sensor node’s lifetime in a wearable gait-detection application, where nodes communicate via a Bluetooth main radio.

The use of mobile and wireless communication technologies to facilitate and improve healthcare and medical services is bringing a shift to healthcare delivery. In this context, an important application scenario is represented by dentistry applications and more generally, intraoral sensors applications. An oral sensory system that allows real-time monitoring of intraoral parameters/activities would open new opportunities for both dentistry applications and more generally wellness applications. This paper provides an overview of the possible applications of intraoral sensors wirelessly connected to external devices, outlining open challenges and research directions.

Wi-Fi offloading allows the data traffic, coming from users of smartphones and tablets from congested areas of the 3G/HSDPA network, to be routed over a Wi-Fi network according to certain QoS and congestion parameters. In this paper a way to implement a 3G Wi-Fi offload solution in a cellular network is analyzed. Three offload algorithms that were developed by researchers from different universities are studied. Moreover, network measurements are performed on a real operator network to present current network capabilities to support 3G Wi-Fi offload. The results show that the signal of the two technologies is good enough for a controlled offload, but the network is not yet adapted to support such a transfer.

Today many different propagation models predict the coverage area of digital television (DTV) services providing various level of precision on case-by-case manner. These models tend to be very inaccurate in situations that are not nominal to the appropriate propagation model definition. The general aim of this paper is to investigate the possible problems related to the near-large-water-surface DTV reception and its prediction. The work involves a case study radio spectrum measurements and signals calculation utilizing existing propagation models. In particular, the paper provides a numerical comparison of calculated and measured TV signal levels for several points near the Dojran Lake on both sides of the Macedonian-Greek border. The values reveal significant dependence between the receiving signal strength and the antenna height, as well as its micro-location, which prove that such locations represent a big challenge for coverage area prediction and control.

Many spectrum sensing algorithms have as a purpose determining if the primary users (PUs) are present or absent, by using statistical signal characteristics. However, for a better management of a cognitive network, additional information about PUs, such as their position, is required. Motivated by these requirements, this paper investigate the performance of MUSIC and Capon algorithms in Cognitive Radio networks context and show that the MUSIC algorithm is highly accurate and stable while also providing a high angular resolution compared to the Capon algorithm.

Power control in LTE wireless networks is essential for efficient co-channel interference management. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, the the global maximization of the weighted sum rate through power allocation is difficult to achieve. Moreover, the digital switchover and the reallocation of the upper UHF band (790–860 MHz) for LTE-800 cellular networks contribute for the necessity to control the aggregate interference caused to the DVB-T service. This paper develops an algorithm for optimal power allocation for the LTE system, which targets minimization of the adjacent channel interference onto the DVB-T system and capacity/coverage optimization of the LTE-800 macro cells. The algorithm adopts the local d.c. (difference of convex functions) programming approach and constraints the power based on the relevant DVB-T adjacent channel protection ratios (PRs). The simulation results emphasize the significance of the proposed algorithm, revealing substantial performance gains compared with the case of no power control, in terms of capacity per pixel, coverage probability and probability for pixel DVB-T service degradation.

Wireless localization has become a key technology for cooperative agent networks. However, for many applications, it is still illusive to reach the desired level of accuracy and robustness, especially in indoor environments which are characterized by harsh multipath propagation. In this work we introduce a cooperative low-complexity algorithm that utilizes multipath components for localization instead of suffering from them. The algorithm uses two types of measurements: (i) bistatic measurements between agents and (ii) monostatic (bat-like) measurements by the individual agents. Simulations that use data generated from a realistic channel model, show the applicability of the methodology and the high level of accuracy that can be reached.

Virtual fingerprints have been proposed in the context of WiFi Fingerprinting Indoor Positioning systems in order to reduce the effort dedicated to offline measurements. In this work, the use of Multi-Wall Multi-Floor indoor propagation models to generate such virtual fingerprints is investigated. Experimental results show that different trade-offs can be obtained between model accuracy and measurement efforts and that good accuracy can be guaranteed while significantly reducing the complexity of the offline measurement phase.

Time Reversal is well-known in Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband communications (IR-UWB) for its ability to improve performance and complexity both in noise limited scenarios and multiuser interference (MUI) limited ones. In an ad-hoc uncoordinated network, where no power control is possible, no users’ channels are known, or no elaborate multiple access techniques can be deployed, Time Reversal is imperfect. In this paper, a comparative analysis between conventional Rake schemes and Time Reversal ones is made in order to evaluate robustness towards the absence of the mentioned operations.

This paper studies a new techniques for localization system in railway transport using UWB radio and Time Reversal technique (TR) techniques. Communication and localization in rail applications represents a permanent and evolutionary need, motivated by the improvement of the quality and safety of transports. Ultra wide band appears as a very suitable technology for this kind of application, due to its large bandwidth, also to its good resistance to the interference and to multipath. Time Reversal channel pre-filtering facilitates signal detection and helps increasing the received energy in a targeted area. In this paper, we evaluate the characteristics of spatio-temporal focusing of time reversal on the one hand, and secondly we compare systems without time reversal UWB location and tracking systems with time reversal UWB in terms of error localization. These studies are conducted in simulation and experimentation.

The rise of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in the age of globalization significantly affects SEE (South Eastern European) security. Although these technologies help the region of SEE to become more interconnected, interrelated and thus, boost the SEE countries’ commodity, prosperity and competitiveness put in security context, these technologies have increased unpredictability, complexity and the threats to the SEE security. In this line, as to the rest of the world, modern terrorism represents an inevitable burden of the SEE governments’ security. Today, it is more than clear that modern terrorist groups and individuals exploit cyberspace to achieve strategic advantage against the mightier enemies. Therefore, based on the recent experience the article explains how and in which way terrorist use of a cyberspace could affect CII (critical information infrastructure) in the region of SEE. Giving the specific dynamics in the region, article first explains how terrorists’ use of modern ICT and cyberspace serves to accomplish their strategic agenda. Then it explains how terrorist could affect CIIs in the region of SEE and thus affect the overall SEE regions’ security.

In this paper, an analysis of security attacks on network elements along with the appropriate countermeasures is presented. The network topology that has been attacked is designed in GNS3 software tool installed on Windows operating system, while the attacks are performed in Kali Linux operating system. Three groups of security attacks (Denial of Service, Man in the Middle, and Control Plane attacks) are observed in simulation scenarios with a detailed analysis on each of them, followed by a presentation of practical performance and ways of prevention (protection) against the attacks.

The paper shows detailed analysis of the effects of the AuthRF (Authentication Request Flooding) and AssRF (Association Request Flooding) MAC Layer DoS (Denial of Service) attacks on 802.11e wireless standard based on a proposed queuing model. More specific, the paper analyzes the Access Point (AP) behavior under AuthRF DoS attacks with different frequency of the requests arrival, i.e. Low Level (LL), Medium Level (ML) and High Level (HL), at the same time considering different traffic priorities. The proposed queuing model and the developed analytical approach can be also used on each protocol layer, especially if the attacks are seen in terms of the flooding influence over AP with too many requests (ICMP, TCP SYN, UDP etc.).

Public Safety Agencies deal with emergency events on a regular basis. They require reliable, highly available and secure network to provide services to the public. Furthermore, the demand for new features, such as video and audio streaming, transmission of still pictures, short messages and access to database applications, is on the rise. It is up to the design engineers to plan and support all current and future requirements. This paper will simulate emergency scenario where Public Safety agencies are called upon and analyze the network impact from the capacity point of view.

Considerations for implementing system that will record medical condition of participants on the battlefield always follow a path for best data gathering, data analyzing and fast implementation of medical procedures for saving lives. Smart I (eye) Advisory Rescue System (SIARS) has aim to process and transmit medical data of injured or wounded person which will allow saving more injured patients and lessen the death-rate on the battlefield. The dataflow in the system has a military significance during the military missions and communication security must be on an appropriate level. This paper presents review for communication and authentication security challenges in the process of SIARS development. The overarching goal for security issue about the system is to determine the factors that are influencing the secure communication and authentication between endpoints. Furthermore, the paper presents the best practices for achieving secure communication and authentication by using existing solutions. The focal points in this paper are security gaps in Bluetooth Smart communication with data collectors and security issues in VHF radio and 4G communications for data transport to database elements.

Security is a major issue in networks these days. Network attacks are widely explored topic when it comes to network security and protection. In this paper two types of DDoS attacks are explored considering the mesh Wireless Sensor Network topology. That is, a path based attack on the PAN Coordinator and a path based attack on the ZigBee router. Several performance parameters which are analyzed show severe deterioration of performance of the network under attack.

The CHEST demo platform facilitates a solution that can help patients suffering from COPD to adjust the conditions in their home environment and everyday life. The developed demo offers a simple and user-friendly solution, which consists of a sensor network that measures the relevant COPD parameters (number of steps; indoor temperature; level of carbon dioxide; air humidity; temperature), a developed cloud solution for data management, and a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays daily measured parameters, parameters’ statistics and interacts with the patients via specific notifications.

The main research goal of this paper is to find out if scaled resources offer scaled performance in case of a demo e-Business application hosted on Windows Azure. The results prove that scaled resources can give even better performance than the expected the scaling factor, usually expressed as ratio between the number of used cores in rented virtual machines. A superlinear region is observed when the performance is higher than the scaling factor of the used resources.

The application cannot be moved to other cloud vendor on the same cloud service layer easily since it depends on the lower cloud services, as well as on the target vendor’s application and data structure. In general case the cloud applications are neither interoperable, nor portable. This paper overviews the cloud portability and its application on various service models. It analyzes and categorizes all aspects of cloud computing portability, puts perspective on each defined process and describes the current development stage for each perspective.

Basic Internet foundation is an institute that aims to ensure optimized content delivery for capacity-limited networks. In this paper we describe the foundation’s initiative in offering free access to low capacity Internet to people in areas with low admission and economic problems and/or no Internet coverage. The main contribution of this paper consists in pointing out solutions that this foundation proposes, as well as what other programs or companies have found encouraging their development.

As demonstrated by numerous ethno-anthropological studies, food can be a powerful basis for the integration of different ethnic groups and populations. The Bread project uses this integration capability, rooted in the convivial atmosphere of the experience of eating together, to address the pressing issue of the integration of migrant communities and host communities in the face of the recent migration flows that cross the world and that in Mediterranean Europe find one of their focal hubs. As part of the Bread philosophy, food is the Trojan horse for full-spectrum cultural integration, so we can actually say that the goal is to go from “global bellies” to “global minds”. To this end, a platform was developed that merge this ancestral capacity of food with the potential offered by the Internet, Web 2.0 and technologies and advanced solutions for social networking and for the dynamic acquisition and sharing of content. But Bread is a concept replicable on a global scale as well as adaptable to local needs and features, and the implementation referred to here is indeed adapted to the specific context of the city of Rome.

Cultural Heritage has got great importance in recent years, in order to preserve countries history and traditions and to support social and economic improvements. Typical IoT smart technologies represent an effective mean to support understanding of Cultural Heritage, by their capability to involve different users and to catch their explicit and implicit preferences, behaviors and contributions. This paper presents FEDRO, an authoring platform, as part of the intelligent infrastructures developed in DATABENC to support a cultural exhibition of “talking” sculptures held in the Southern Italy, in 2015. FEDRO aims to automatically generate textual and users profiled artworks biographies, employed to feed a smart app for guiding visitors during the exhibition. A preliminary experimentation revealed a tangible improvement in the users’ experience appreciation during the visit. Quality estimations of generated output were also computed exploiting users’ feedbacks, collected through a manual questionnaire, subscribed at the end of their visit.

We consider the problem of estimation of sparse time dispersive channels in pilot aided OFDM systems on Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) channels, i.e. with a single transmit and multiple receive antennas. In such systems the channels are inherently continuous-time and sparse, and there is a common support of the channel coefficients of channels associated with different antennas, resulting from the same scatterer. To exploit these properties, we propose a new channel estimation algorithm that combines the atomic norm minimization of the Multiple Measurement Vector (MMV) model, the MUSIC and the least squares (LS) methods. The atomic norm minimization of the MMV model allows to exploit the common support assumption and the continuous-time nature of the channels, MUSIC allows for simple joint estimation of the delays corresponding to the same scatterer, and LS allows for estimation of the path gains. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we compare its performance with the case when the common support assumption is not used.

In this paper we present approximations of the outage probability for an amplify-and-forward MIMO relaying system with three nodes, which employs multiple antennas at the nodes and orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) transmission over a flat Rayleigh fading. In the amplify-and-forward relay, the incoming signal is decoupled, amplified and forwarded to the destination. Under assumption of availability of full channel state information at the relay and destination and availability of direct link between the source and destination we derived expression for approximation of the outage probability which is sufficiently accurate in the entire SNR range of practical interest. The results obtained by this approximation are compared with the approximations for outage probability of the system without direct link to the destination.

We consider a point-to-point wireless communication link, with a perpetual energy source, since a base station, sends energy to energy harvesting nodes. These nodes employ a so called “harvest than transmit” protocol, hence they use the harvested energy to send information in the uplink. We present 3 ways of maximizing the achievable throughput, one via optimizing the base station output power, the second via optimizing the duration of the Energy Harvesting phase and a novel transmission scheme that jointly optimizes both the Base Station output power as well as the Energy Harvesting phase duration. This third scheme, is the main contribution of this paper.

The paper is presenting an advanced QoS provisioning module with vertical multi-homing framework for future 5G mobile terminals (5GMT) with radio network aggregation capability and traffic load sharing in heterogeneous mobile and wireless environments. The proposed 5GMT framework is leading to high performance utility networks with high QoS provisioning for any given multimedia service and multi-RAT capabilities. It is using vertical multi-homing and virtual QoS routing algorithms within the mobile terminal, that is able to handle simultaneously multiple radio network connections via multiple wireless and mobile network interfaces. The performance of our proposed 5GMT is evaluated using simulations with multimedia traffic in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks under different network conditions.

The communication between hearing and speech impaired people, and the rest of the world is generally done through sign language. However, only less than 1 % of the world’s population can communicate using this language and thus setting a barrier in everyday situations. This paper tackles the previous problem by offering a solution based on the concept of smart gloves. A smart glove is a glove equipped with sensing gear, computational power and intelligence that can easily track every movement of a hand and as such, is able to also recognize characteristic positions allowing sign language to text conversion, as well as audio presentation of the letter shown. In addition, the detailed realization process of this kind of glove follows a budget-friendly concept in order to enable financial ease in rebuilding and further development.