QUIC is emerging as the de facto transport protocol for modern applications and forms the basis of HTTP/3. Within the European Space Agency (ESA) project QUICoS, we developed QUIC-Wave, a satellite-tailored extension of QUIC designed to address the limitations of TCP-based transport in high-latency and lossy satellite environments (GEO, MEO, LEO). Unlike Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) approaches, QUIC-Wave preserves end-to-end semantics and encryption while enhancing congestion control. The protocol extensions are engineered to sustain throughput and responsiveness under satellite-specific conditions such as long RTTs, bandwidth variability, and mobility-induced handovers, while maintaining compliance with QUIC specifications and interoperability with terrestrial networks. To validate QUIC-Wave, we conducted extensive real experiments using standard browsers and servers. Results show that QUIC-Wave supports interactive web browsing and multimedia streaming with improved performance over satellite links, without compromising either end-to-end encryption or protocol integrity.

With the increasing adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their technological advancements, particularly in terms of autonomy and computational capabilities, their role as active component in wireless networks could be groundbreaking. Such potential is especially relevant in constrained environments that lack proper telecommunication infrastructure or adequate network coverage. These contexts are where the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a vital technology, capable of facilitating sensing operations and data retrieval by leveraging communication protocols like LoRa for long-range, low-energy transmissions. In this paper, we introduce the Traveland-Offload Problem (TOP), a new combinatorial optimization problem, formulated both as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model and as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model. Its primary objective is to minimize the energy consumption associated with UAV operations and data offloading tasks. Our formulation, which incorporates realistic models for energy consumption and communication, aims to optimally determine the UAV’s trajectory, hovering points and durations, as well as critical transmission parameters of LoRa-enabled sensors, while ensuring compliance with the transmission policies defined by the LoRaWAN network protocol.

Urban areas struggle with parking management and environmental monitoring. This paper introduces ParkSense, an IoT sensor system that addresses both challenges with a unified solution. The system detects parking occupancy using VL53L0XV2 time-of-flight sensors while monitoring temperature and humidity via DHT22 sensors. A multi-layered network architecture integrates ESP-NOW for short-range communication and LoRa for long-range data transmission, ensuring efficient urban coverage with low power consumption. Data flows through a hierarchical sensor-gateway network to a central server. The modular design supports scalable deployment, minimizing infrastructure costs. Our prototype demonstrates how combining parking management and environmental monitoring can provide municipalities with valuable real-time data while enhancing urban space management.

Recent advancements in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have led to their widespread adoption across diverse operational domains. Their extended flight endurance and increasing onboard computational capabilities make them particularly valuable in communication systems, especially in urban, industrial, and poorly connected environments. In parallel, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a complementary technology, enabling sensing and data offloading through ad hoc protocols such as LoRaWAN. The effective integration of UAVs and IoT, however, raises new challenges in trajectory planning and energy-efficient data transmission, particularly under the strict operational constraints of LoRaWAN networks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Path-and-Offloading Problem (POP), a new combinatorial optimization problem that jointly considers UAV trajectory design and data offloading. POP is formulated both as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model and as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) variant. The objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of UAV operations and sensor transmissions, while ensuring compliance with LoRaWAN transmission policies and completing data offloading from sensors to a single UAV. Our formulation, which incorporates realistic energy and communication models, optimizes the UAV trajectory, its hovering locations and durations, and key transmission parameters of LoRa-enabled sensors. Computational experiments across diverse scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed models, providing practical insights into UAV-enabled IoT networks.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) rely on content moderation systems to ensure platform and user safety by preventing malicious activities such as the spread of harmful content. However, there is a growing consensus suggesting that such systems are unfair to historically marginalized individuals, fragile users, and minorities. Additionally, OSN policies are often hardcoded in artificial intelligence–based violation classifiers, making personalized content moderation challenging. In addition, there is a need for more communication between users and platform administrators, especially in the case of disagreement about a moderation decision. To address these issues, we propose integrating content moderation systems with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance support for personal content moderation and improve user–platform communication. We also evaluate the content moderation capabilities of GPT 3.5 and LLaMa 2, comparing them with commercial products, as well as discuss the limitations of our approach and the open research directions.

The DEDICAT-6G project emphasizes dynamic re-sourcing, connectivity, flexibility, and trustworthiness for emerging human-centric services. In response, our Vulnerable Road User safety solution targets the need for heightened awareness in urban settings, leveraging edge computing, communication protocols, and efficient resource management to reduce intersection-related accidents. Our architecture involves Road Side Units, On-Board Units, and Vulnerable Road Users, with a Collision Detection Edge Application for real-time data analysis, incorporating a Monitoring System that facilitates comprehensive performance evaluation. A simulation considering limited sight scenarios at intersections yielded promising early results, indicating the efficacy of our approach. Future endeavors encompass real-world implementation, advanced algorithm integration, resource optimization, and environmental impact assessment, all contributing to advancing secure and adaptive communication systems.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites offer a promising solution for ubiquitous connectivity and can be utilized in 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) for applications like IoT, autonomous driving, and rural communication. They are particularly suited for smart mobility in urban environments, where fast data transmission and real-time control of vehicles and infrastructure are crucial. In this study, we compare TCP protocols for satellite communication in smart mobility scenarios and propose a solution that uses a limited buffer size to reduce per-packet delays without affecting the throughput.

This short paper introduces a novel approach to mobile phone cases, addressing the demand for both protection and added functionality. Traditional cases often add bulk to phones without providing additional benefits. We propose smart cases that utilize unused space to integrate innovative features, focusing initially on wireless charging. By incorporating wireless charging capabilities, we offer a cost-effective solution for users seeking to enhance their devices without upgrading. Additionally, we explore the integration of various innovative ideas, resulting in two distinct variants: Variant 1, a wired solution for phones lacking wireless charging, and Variant 2, which leverages reverse charging technology for phones already equipped with wireless charging capabilities. Our research also delves into achieving wireless data transmission within these cases, employing generic modules to host FTP servers and assessing their real-time performance. This study outlines a framework for developing smart cases that not only protect but also enhance the functionality of mobile phones.

Reliable communications play a pivotal role in ensuring an efficient response and the coordination of recovery and rescue efforts. However, conventional communication methods may not always be accessible or dependable in such situations. In such circumstances, constellations of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can provide high bandwidth capabilities with relatively low latency, making them well-suited for supporting on-the-ground disaster management teams. Satellites can either complement or replace terrestrial telecommunication infrastructures. In this context, reliance on the recently defined QUIC protocol allows for a seamless transition from terrestrial to satellite communication as needed. Therefore, we investigate the possible use of a dual-stack node architecture along with the employment of the QUIC transport protocol for emergency communications, assuming that the backhaul link used to transfer users’ applications data may need to be changed (seamlessly). We conduct an extensive emulation study, evaluating the performance of QUIC under varying queuing policies and Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) behaviour, providing practical insights and recommendations to enhance the protocol’s efficiency and robustness. The key aspects and configurations of QUIC protocol stack are identified, presenting optimal communication configurations leveraging CoDel and BBR CCA.

The digital and mobile revolutions have changed the way people live their sexuality. Sexting, the practice of sending or receiving any sexually explicit content through mobile devices, has gained popularity, especially amongst teenagers and young adults, bringing several concerns, such as the uncontrolled spread of personal nude or semi-nude media without the owner's consent. Moreover, messaging applications generally used to communicate (and practice sexting) are not safe enough, e.g., they permit to send and forward any received content to anyone else. In this scenario, we believe that, beside education, technological solutions should be devised to avoid or limit sexting abuse. To this aim, we have developedSafeSext, a proof of concept messaging system, which also implements an image forwarding control feature. Through it, we have analyzed possible solutions, as well as their limits, in supporting a safer messaging environment where users retain some form of control over the forwarding of their self-generated sensitive contents.

Cities have been developed to support cars rather than people. This has led to a decrease in people's ability to move, live and interact with their urban surroundings., thus affecting the quality-of-life. Obviously., this applies to all of us, especially to people suffering from impairments. Surprisingly, the lack of information is one of the main obstacles to the construction of services that could bridge the gap between people living in urban areas and their environment. Take Google Maps as an example; one can request a route between any two destinations and will surely be provided with the shortest path, whether traveling by car, public transportation, or on foot. However, there are no pathways or information available to help visually impaired people. In response to the above issue, in this paper, we discuss how the widespread presence of sensor-equipped smartphones can be harnessed to create innovative services capable of improving factors such as interaction with the environment, social inclusion, and quality of life.

The Internet of Drones represents an emerging framework with a plethora of applications in the context of Beyond-5G networks. Drone technology uses are spreading from commercial, industrial up to military applications. Drones, a.k.a. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are largely adopted in all those fields where men cannot reach or are unable to perform in a timely and efficient manner. Communications among UAVs are important to allow task coordination and network organization. However, as a drawback, UAVs are strongly affected by energy consumption that limits their flight and task accomplishment. In this paper, we address the energy consumption issue in UAV swarms and present a novel routing approach, namely ENSING, that aims to save energy consumption. Differently from previous approaches that simply reduce the number of control packets to save UAV battery level, ENSING approach selects the next-hop UAV forwarder according to energy constraints. In this way, only eligible UAVs with acceptable energy requirements can be selected in the packet forwarding, thus avoiding the involvement of those UAVs with limited battery level. Compared to other routing techniques, ENSING exhibits better performance in terms of packet delivery rate, throughput and latency.

The United Nations defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to foster equitable, healthy, inclusive and safe communities. Clearly, they involve even social networks and, in particular, the sexuality expressed through them. For instance, consider sexting, the practice of sharing self-generated explicit content through mobile devices. Besides its popularity, this phenomenon carries several concerns, such as the possible damages caused by the spread of personal nude or semi-nude images without the owner’s consent. Unfortunately, messaging applications generally used to practice sexting are not safe enough as they permit to share any received content with anyone else. Aimed at preventing sexting-related adverse consequences for the wellness of people and creating safer, gender-equal and inclusive online communities, we discuss possible technological approaches to contrast the non-consensual spread of private self-generated content and, in particular, we analyse the impact of employing decentralised architectures in this context.

Sexting, the practice of sending and receiving self-generated sexually explicit contents via mobile phone, is becoming more and more popular among the young generation, although at the cost of risking the exposure of their private material. Teenagers are not the only category at risk: one may wonder whether this practice can be even more dangerous for people with disabilities or an opportunity for them to explore their sexuality in an exposure-controlled way. In this work, we present preliminary results of an analysis regarding sexting through multimedia and how its use is perceived. Furthermore, without denying that it is crucial to educate people about the best behaviours and the drawbacks related to sexting, yet we believe that technology could help users in controlling the dissemination/forwarding of their sexy selfies and we discuss here how.

Smartphones have become popular also due to the innovative pervasive services they enable thanks to their sensors and ubiquitous connectivity. In this paper we present an innovative app merging the real world with the virtual one thanks to the possibility to link users’ generated media with specific geographic locations. Our app is a proof of concept built on Android OS and allows users to post geolocated media pinning them on specific coordinates. Other users can interact with these media by consuming them, leaving comments or adding new ones. Furthermore, users can contribute to extending their visibility by upvoting them, bringing a social component to the mix.

MQTT is becoming a clear standard in the IoT arena. Its flexibility in interconnecting various devices by decoupling timing and locations from the interaction among clients is extremely interesting in current deployments. The centralized approach of MQTT brings anyway drawbacks that are currently being tackled by researchers and practitioners. In this paper we provide a preliminary evaluation of the process of embedding an MQTT broker using the 5G Network Virtual Function approach. Through a real testbed, we measure how an MQTT broker can scale at the edge by regulating the incoming traffic using a load balancing approach.

Simulations for network implementations are an essential component for developing newer and better network solutions and protocols, especially when considering complex scenarios. For instance, networks composed of flying objects coordinating through multi-hop communication represent a foreseeable scenario in our society. The need for analyzing new and tailored solutions for this visionary context passes through the creation of specific tools. To this aim, we present here a novel discrete event simulator deployed to test Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) and, in particular, their routing algorithms. In our simulator we have also implemented two different position-based routing protocols for FANETs; their implementation and results are discussed as well.

The recent trend of network disaggregation and community push towards open source network management and orchestration projects has given rise to a rich ecosystem of frameworks and tools. In particular, ETSI NFV proposes a conceptual, reference architecture standardizing management and control interfaces in softwarized mobile broadband networks. These frameworks present highly customizable features, embodying varying degrees of complexity, communed by a steep learning curve. In this article, we propose a stepby-step description of a virtualized testbed environment setup, adopting an NFV-compliant ecosystem, describing an implementation of the NFV SOL002 reference point which aims to standardize the lifecycle management of virtualized functions. In addition, we present an experimental assessment measuring the mobile core deployment times.

Abstract Wearable technology is no longer science fiction. Thanks to the growing capability in the production chain to miniaturize complex electronics, a wide variety of gadgets that can be worn or included in dresses and accessories have emerged. These smart gadgets can collect data about the physical condition of the user and/or the environment providing the basis for innovative and valuable services. The main goal of this paper is to assess this context through field experiments undertaken in a testbed comprised of sensing hardware deployed on open source boards such as Arduino. Moreover, coupled with the sensing tier, we propose a proof‐of‐concept deployment architecture enabling a wide range of wearable sensors to collect and transmit data to a logically centralized unit.

Abstract 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 bystatelesssolutions, 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 atabu searchapproach, 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.

Even if the World Wide Web is one of the main content and service providers, unfortunately, these contents and services are not really available for everyone. People affected by impairments often have difficulties in navigating Web pages for a wide range of reasons. In this paper, we focus on people affected by dyslexia. These users experience difficulties in reading acquisition, despite normal intelligence and adequate access to conventional instruction. For this reason, we have created Help me read!, a Chrome extension that allows to change many features of a Web page. Furthermore, it allows to isolate and enlarge one word at a time. This feature is crucial as it allows people with dyslexia to focus on each single word, thus overcoming one of their main difficulties.

Is the World Wide Web for everyone? Long story short: no and unfortunately it is not only a matter of infrastructures, level of instruction or economic conditions. People affected by visual impairments have often difficulties in navigating web pages for a wide range of reasons. One of the biggest obstacles nowadays is the use of CAPTCHAs, powerful tools against bot attacks but also potential virtual barriers for the aforementioned category of users. In this paper we tested various categories of CAPTCHAs with people affected by visual impairment and not, to understand how discriminatory can be these cybersecurity measures.

The fruition of multimedia contents has been revolutionized by the spread of broadband technology. Furthermore, the advent of the cloud is now moving the computational load, once prerogative of domestic devices, to remote servers. This is bringing achievements that were unthinkable only few years ago, like the provisioning of new multimedia services through the Internet. To guarantee a proper user experience, a low E2E latency and a high bandwidth are both essential. Unfortunately, this is difficult to accomplish in a shared and best-effort network like the Internet. We need to focus on the study and analysis of modern network protocols to identify viable solutions for a suitable user experience. This is especially the case of QUIC, a recent transport protocol able to reduce significantly some issues mentioned above. Our aim is to explore QUIC and its integration into a Smart Access Point, enabling a better management of heterogeneous co-existing media flows.

Cloud-based interactive multimedia applications such as virtual games and video streaming are gaining high popularity. However, giving the high bandwidth consumption, the remote execution can negatively impact the quality of the multimedia traffic. In such a realm, data travel different communication networks from the cloud to the final users crossing the last meters the home's access point (AP). In such a scenario, the quality-of-service (QoS) support is a challenging task, particularly in the home network environment, with heterogeneous applications simultaneously running and consuming the available bandwidth. To address this issue, we propose ReiLeCS, a Reinforcement Learning-based Controller and Scheduler for interactive multimedia traffic in Home Area Networks (HAN). Through reinforcement learning and the maximization of a reward function, it enables the AP to schedule the arriving multimedia traffic from the cloud according to their required QoS. Simulation results using real multimedia traffic conditions demonstrate that ReiLeCS achieves better performances compared with existing packet scheduling policies.

Air quality and the presence of tiny particular matter are crucial factors in human health, especially when considering urban scenarios. In this context, smart mobility coupled with low-cost sensors can create a distributed and sustainable platform for social sensing able to provide pervasive data to citizens and public administrations. Sustainable and eco-aware decisions can then be supported by empirical evidence, resulting in an improved life and city administration. In this paper, we present ArduECO, a simple Arduino-based wireless device able of collecting air quality data. Without loss of generality, we have designed our device as a box that can be installed on a bike; in this way, beyond private bikes, municipalities could exploit their bike sharing fleets as pervasive sensing systems.

The increase in the amount of traffic with heterogeneous QoS requirements poses several challenges to end-to-end service provisioning. Network resource management and service differentiation are two crucial functionalities employed by service providers, proven essential in order to meet the end user requirements. In particular, application-driven networking has emerged as a viable alternative embodying the potential of enabling specific flow optimizations meeting application-specific requirements. In this context, Service Function Chaining (SFC) is seen as an enabling technology for the flexible management of specific service/application traffic. In this paradigm the network functions are seen as an ordered chain of interconnected functions handling traffic delivery (data plane), control and management. In this article we present a work in progress of a virtualized, container-based testbed with orchestration and management capabilities supporting service chains.

In this paper we propose a theoretical model, which may be put to good use to analyze the energy consumption of a smartphone where a random number of different applications are assumed to run, for random intervals of time, consuming the available energy resources. The problem is formulated in terms of the following mobile application(s) parameters, namely: (i) the maximum possible running time, (ii) the average amount of energy consumed per time unit while running, (iii) the average number of apps that are employed during a given smartphone's usage. The model is solved in terms of the probability distribution function of the energy consumed on a given smartphone. The proposed model is then validated by simulation means, in order to prove its applicability in quantifying the amount of energy consumed.

The actual advent of autonomous vehicles and the general improvement of traffic safety pass through quick and reliable message dissemination in a certain Area of Interest (AoI). Message dissemination among the vehicles composing an Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is of paramount importance and has to make use of fast and efficient multi-hop message forwarding to broadcast information. While most of existing works focus only on simple car platooning scenarios (e.g., a highway), we discuss here a fast multi-hop broadcast protocol able to quickly and reliably propagate an alert message even in general 2D (and 3D) topology scenarios.

We consider the scenario in which several TCP connections share the same access point (AP) and a congestion avoidance/control mechanism is adopted with the aim of assigning the available bandwidth to the clients with a certain fairness. When UDP traffic with real-time requirements is present, the problem becomes even more challenging. Very well-known congestion avoidance mechanisms are the Random Early Detection (RED) and the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). More recently, the Smart Access Point with Limited Advertised Window (SAP-LAW) has been proposed. Its main idea is that of computing the maximum TCP rate for each connection at the bottleneck, taking into account the UDP traffic to keep a low queue size combined with a reasonable bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we propose a new congestion control mechanism, namely, Smart-RED, inspired by SAP-LAW heuristic formula. We study its performance by using mean field models and compare the behaviours of ECN/RED, SAP-LAW, and Smart-RED under different scenarios. We show that while Smart-RED maintains some of the desirable properties of the SAP-LAW, it solves the problems it may have in case of bursty UDP traffic or TCP connections with very different needs of bandwidth.

The worldwide diffusion of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era of distributed sensing. Indeed, mobile sensing and wireless technology can be exploited to create new information and services that have the potential to improve our lives in many ways. This becomes even more interesting if the benefits could reach the whole community, even people with disadvantages that are often left out by the digital divide. To this aim, we have developed a system able to offer an enhanced route navigation system, while at the same time gathering quality data through smartwatches. Even more interesting, we have endowed our system with an interaction paradigm based on vibration patterns so as to guide the user without the need for looking at the device. Our proposal avoids user distraction and field trials demonstrate its effectiveness when employed by visually impaired people.

New in-car communications and entertainment systems have emerged, enabling interconnection of various components in vehicles (e.g., TVs, CD/DVD players, media players, and cell phones). With the new advances of automotive industry, car passengers embody the next consumers that will be targeted by online game providers. In this context, researchers on online games demonstrated the importance of the network's performance in determining the quality level perceived by consumers. Enabling games over Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) will require the design of secure architectures against threats, in order to not jeopardize the effectiveness of online gaming over VANET. These threats could increase the delivery delay of game events, leading to the unsatisfaction of passengers. In this paper, we address security threats for online gaming over VANET. In particular, we focus on a representative vehicular broadcast algorithm, and we discuss a cheating threat. Indeed, the attacker could use the location-aware game message exchange to cheat about his position, thus enforcing game events to be delayed, and reduce the quality of service. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the impact of the position cheating attack to the online gaming over VANET.

It is easy to foresee a future with many smart and connected things, static or moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Things (IoT) with a 3D topology. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art routing protocols for ad-hoc networks have been designed to work in 2D scenarios. We here evaluate how these routing protocols would perform in a 3D IoT.

We consider a scenario where connectivity is offered to users through a multihop wireless network and show how both the file download's goodput and the real time stream's per-packet delivery delay can be improved by making involved nodes take into consideration the multihop nature of their connection.1

Wearable devices are constantly expanding in number and functionalities within both the IT market and the fashion market. Smart watches have become very popular and have moved from a tool only showing information related to the smartphone to a device able to monitor and display a vast plethora of data, including data related to the owner's health (e.g., hearth rate, body temperature, steps per day, etc.). This huge amount of data that wearables in the world can generate could be further elaborated to become even more useful. Yet, designing effective solutions to collect, store and elaborate sensors data is a challenging task. To this aim, in this paper, we present a framework to model a wearable sensors network in a simple and flexible in order to adapt to different scenarios.

Vehicular networks are receiving more and more attention from researchers and practitioners. In this context, it is particularly interesting to study realistic scenarios where vehicles are connected among themselves, or with other nodes. Think, for instance, of cooperating interconnecting objects forming an Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to collectively decide on maneuvers. Such connected autonomous vehicles would certainly require fast but also reliable group communications. Broadcast in wireless networks would be useful in this scenario if a tradeoff between reliable message delivery and low overhead can be solved. To this aim, we evaluate the performance of probabilistic flooding schemes and propose a heuristic-based solution that seems promising in fitting the IoV's needs.

Summary Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have grown in popularity. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors, connected as wireless nodes in an ad‐hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad‐hoc mode instead of the traditional client‐server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of network disconnection, ie, due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before a disconnection occurs due to energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model considering static network topologies and both numerical and simulation‐based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective. Contemplating for mobility, we present a simulation study employing actual packet routing protocols and discuss the tradeoffs that emerge.

In recent years we have seen a great proliferation of smart vehicles, ranging from cars to little drones (both terrestrial and aerial), all endowed with sensors and communication capabilities. It is hence easy to foresee a future with even more smart and connected vehicles moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this IoV, a multitude of nodes (both static and mobile) will generate a continuous multihop flow of local information to support local smart environment applications. Therefore, one interesting environment for the IoV would be in the form of 3-D mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Unfortunately, MANET routing protocols have generally been designed and analyzed keeping in mind a 2-D scenario; there is no guarantee on how they would support a 3-D topology of the IoV. To this end, we have considered routing protocols deemed as the state-of-the-art for classic MANETs and tested them over 3-D topologies to evaluate their assets and technical challenges.

Scalable routing for wireless communication systems is a compelling and challenging task. To this aim, routing algorithms exploiting geographic information have been proposed. These algorithms refer to nodes by their location, rather than their address, and use those coordinates to route greedily towards a destination. With the advent of unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV) technology, a lot of research effort has been devoted to extend position-based packet routing proposals to three dimensional environments. In this context, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs), comprised of autonomous flying vehicles, pose several issues. This work focuses on the state-of-the-art, stateless geographic packet routing protocols conceived or adapted for three-dimensional network scenarios. Proposals are evaluated over a common scenario through a comprehensive comparative analysis.

One of the most profitable and emerging high-tech markets is the one that involves games for PC and consoles; a market that is growing year by year and that is rapidly evolving. Several big game corporations are implementing now the remote video streaming through the domestic network between two devices; a feature that regards not only PCs but also consoles. This paper investigates one of the main services of this type, the Steam In-Home Streaming, to analyze the generated network traffic when considering different types of game. Gathered data can help to understand whether this type of service can actually be supported by today's regular Internet connections.

In this paper we propose event goodput, i.e., the fraction of events which may be successfully managed by a system, as a relevant metric to describe the performance of battery powered real-time sensor networks. Unlike other performance metrics as response, completion, maximum lateness times, all representing fundamental, but different, figures of merit for the description of the behavior of real-time systems, event goodput provides an immediate and a direct relation with the events which may be satisfactorily managed (or not) by a real-time application. We will show such metric well serves the purpose of describing the performance of battery powered, random event-driven networks, such as sensor networks deployed for surveillance and intrusion detection applications, operating in time critical scenarios. In essence, such real-time systems may be assessed in terms of the fraction of events which they successfully/unsuccessfully detect and report within a time interval of interest. The importance of such metric is here demonstrated providing a simulation model and results where the use of the event goodput metric is discussed in conjunction with those metrics which are traditionally utilized for the assessment of a real-time sensor networks.

Mobile networks are expected to serve a wide range of verticals, however the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network is optimized for basic mobile operator services only. The network functions serving LTE networks are largely implemented as dedicated single function devices that offer poor customization options. This intrinsic inflexibility makes current LTE networks unable to meet the requirements of future mobile networks. For example, LTE networks experience signaling storms because the signals exchanged by the network functions cannot be optimized according to the current usage pattern of mobile services. Modularizing these network functions would enable a refactoring of the LTE network, allowing operators to compose networks that adapt and evolve with the influx of verticals. In this article, we present a new approach for refactoring the network functions serving LTE networks which can be leveraged to compose a modular mobile network optimized for the verticals using its services. As an example, we demonstrate that deploying network functions at the edge significantly reduces the signals exchanged within a mobile network.

Mobile games have come to revolutionize the mobile handset and gaming industry, pushing chip vendors to compete in order to provide better and better graphics capabilities by means of dedicated processors. This capability coupled with the sensing and communication ability offered by smartphones, provides the developers with the building blocks for innovative gaming solutions. In particular, multiplayer mobile games could exploit context and proximity information, providing an added value to the gaming experience. In this context, we present the design and analysis of a modern mobile and multiplayer version of the classic Pong game. In addition to the classic interaction model through remote server(s), players could interact and play locally by exploiting ad-hoc connectivity offered by the Wi-Fi Direct technology.

Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques have been proposed to support scenarios with many connections sharing the same bottleneck. The basic idea is that a smart management of the bottleneck queue can avoid the saturation of the link and ensure a smoother use of the available bandwidth. This is generally achieved by exploiting the flux control mechanism of TCP and its behavior in case of packet losses or other explicit notifications. In this paper we consider classic and innovative AQM techniques and analyse their performance under different scenarios through the use of mean field models.

Cities have evolved as a natural environment for cars rather than people. This has limited people's ability to move around, living and interacting with the urban space affecting the experienced quality of life. Clearly, this regards all of us and, in particular, people affected by impairments. One of the main barriers in building services to fill the gap between the urban environment and people living in it is surprisingly represented by the lack of information. Think for instance to Google maps; you can ask for a path between any two destinations and you will receive a response with the shortest path whether you are travelling by car, public transportation or just walking. Yet, there is no path or information available regarding people on a wheelchair or blind. Instead, we discuss in this paper how the vast popularity of sensor-endowed smartphones can be exploited to create unprecedented services able to improve the interaction with the environment, the social inclusion and the quality of life.

In these last few years we are witnessing a change in the way video games are implemented. Starting from an early age, where a single developer was sometimes in charge of the whole creative process, we have moved now toward extremely large groups with a multi-layered organisation. This increasing complexity of team organisation, together with a tremendous growth of projects size, calls for the adoptions of development approaches leveraging on scalability and distributed computing environments. Unfortunately, today's development and execution environments for games (usually called game engines) are suffering from a number of architectural constraints. As a result, we strongly believe current engines will not be able to provide the flexibility and scalability required by game developers of the next generation. To overcome the above limitations, in this paper we propose SMASH (Stackless Microkernel Architecture for SHared environments): an architecture where a game engine is decomposed in several dynamic and independent software modules interacting via a microkernel-like message bus. Game modules can just be inserted, debugged, and removed from a running engine once its internal messaging protocol is clearly defined. Moreover, following this approach, game modules can be dynamically dislocated on multiple machines to obtain a truly distributed, scalable, and fault-resilient system where adaptation can be achieved mostly without downtime.

The market penetration of in-home entertainment systems is playing a crucial role in the diffusion of interactive multimedia services. In this context, thin-client game systems have received a lot of attention, shifting the computational burden of the game play toward the server while the client renders a fat video stream. This paper proposes an analysis of the network characteristics of the Remote Play for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, providing some insights on the network dynamics of this system under different game types. The measurements involve video games of different genres, analyzing the bitrates, the packet size, capturing the dynamics of the whole streaming session. Results indicate that the service generates a large quantity of big packets downstream and smaller and lesser packets upstream. Gathered data can help to understand if this type of service could be offered through the today's normal Internet connections.

This paper investigates one of the main game streaming services, the Steam In-Home Streaming, to analyze the generated network traffic. Gathered data can be used to model this type of traffic in simulations and to determine whether it could be supported by Internet connections around the world.

With vehicular networks quickly becoming the new wireless frontier of the Internet, car passengers embody the next consumers that will be targeted by multimedia content providers. However, researchers and practitioners are still struggling to tackle the technical challenges that raise in this scenario such as, for instance, the continuous variations in the number and type of flows served by the access points along the road. Considering different traveling scenarios in terms of vehicles' speed and location we discuss how access points could be improved to properly address these challenges, ensuring coexistence among heterogeneous types of flow, even in presence of moving vehicles that generate frequent network traffic variations.

Computer-centered services and broadband wireless connectivity have boosted the demand for delivery of multimedia-based entertainment from the Internet to in-house wireless appliances. In this context, rich-media applications can be supported by a variety of protocols, each sharing the same bottleneck, affecting one another's performance. Indeed, in current systems, real-time applications (e.g., video streaming, online games) suffer from delays caused by the interference of elastic, best-effort (e.g., TCP-based download sessions) traffic. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem, addressed by deploying a Vegas-like congestion control algorithm at the home gateway, requiring no client-side modification.

In less than a decade, mobile and wireless technology has quickly evolved providing us means for pervasive computation and communication. Therefore, users quickly shifted from desktop/laptop computers to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This technology is part of everyday life, influencing almost all activities, including the way they learn. In this paper, we consider the use of mobile applications for educational purposes. In particular, we have developed a tool that provides students and teachers with a more pervasive learning experience. Through the use of our quiz game, we can help students in acquiring new knowledge stimulated by competition, while having fun.

Mobile communication devices are expected to overtake traditional desktop PCs and become the dominant point of entry to the Internet. This technology shift has boosted user demand for multimedia applications and services which are now typically accessed through the wireless interface. Users expect to be always connected and able to run a variety of applications which sometimes impose contrasting requirements. Of particular research interest in this scenario is the coexistence between two popular categories of traffic: elastic and real-time, both of them covering a wide range of user applications. In this paper, we investigate the above issue in the scenario where service connectivity is provided through a multihop wireless network. To this end, we study two representative applications, one for each of the above categories, which are content download and interactive game play. We show by means of extensive simulations, how both the content download's goodput and the online game's per-packet delivery delay can be improved through an appropriate solution implemented on the wireless Internet Gateway.

Recent research has proposed swarming protocols as a possible approach to offload the Internet infrastructure when some content can be shared by several users. However, simulations have been generally used as experimental means. Instead, we present an application platform that allows a rapid development and testing of swarming protocols using off-the-shelf smartphones.

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.

Intervehicular communication (IVC) is an important emerging research area that is expected to considerably contribute to traffic safety and efficiency. In this context, many possible IVC applications share the common need for fast multihop message propagation, including information such as position, direction, and speed. However, it is crucial for such a data exchange system to be resilient to security attacks. Conversely, a malicious vehicle might inject incorrect information into the intervehicle wireless links, leading to life and money losses or to any other sort of adversarial selfishness (e.g., traffic redirection for the adversarial benefit). In this paper, we analyze attacks to the state-of-the-art IVC-based safety applications. Furthermore, this analysis leads us to design a fast and secure multihop broadcast algorithm for vehicular communication, which is proved to be resilient to the aforementioned attacks.

Traffic safety through inter-vehicular communication is one of the most promising and challenging applications of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In this context, information such as position, direction, and speed, is often broadcast by vehicles so as to facilitate fast multi-hop propagation of possible alert messages. Unfortunately, a malicious vehicle can inject bogus information or cheat about its position. In this work, we analyze the impact of a position cheating attack on an alert message application. We show that this weakness we found could be leveraged by an adversary in a very effective way. Furthermore, our analysis leads us to design a countermeasure to this threat. Finally, we run a set of simulations which confirm our findings.

ABSTRACT The mobile revolution has brought us the possibility to enjoy our favorite applications anywhere and anytime. In this context, interactive games over mobile networks embody a fascinating case study both for their commercial success and for their technical challenges, thus, sparking interest and development. The current state of the art of interactive games over mobile networks is captured in this article. We discuss main requirements and analyze possible combinations of existing solutions to provide better support for highly interactive game sessions with mobile players. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sensor-enabled smartphone's have become a mainstream platform for researchers due to their ability to collect and process large quantities of data, hence creating new opportunities for innovative applications. Yet, the limits in employing sensors to opportunistically detect human behaviors are not clear and deserve investigation. To this purpose, in this article, we discuss movement pattern recognition in day-by-day urban street behavior. As a case study, we restrict at recognizing situations when a pedestrian stops, crosses a street ruled by a traffic light; to do so we only use data coming from the accelerometer of the pedestrian's smartphone.

Pervasive technology and communication is improving our life and an interesting case study is represented by domotics. Indeed, innovative technology for home automation can be designed to sense our behavior and proactively respond to it. To this aim, we developed a distributed application exploiting the Bluetooth technology to locate a person wearing a mobile device (e.g., a smartphone) among a predefined set of rooms. This information is then utilized to automatically reroute the output of an audio player from one room to another, according to the person's movements over time.

Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educational opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as difficulties in reading is used as first indicator. Yet, being able to detect and treat this problem even in preschool years would ensure better chances to limit its impact and help the child's future reading ability. To this aim, we discuss here a series of serious games we designed and tested to train specific skills that have been proven to be effective against dyslexia.

Web 2.0 is evolving and offering services based on the wide popularity of smartphones and the possibility of gathering data ubiquitously from these mobile devices; this new paradigm is often referred to as Web2. In this paper, we hence present and discuss a Web2 application designed to enable users to interact with remote smartphones' cameras to receive a video generated in real time. In essence, users can individuate on a map which mobile cameras are available in a location of interest and request the remote user to generate and send back a short video of the surrounding environment or event. We discuss technical issues related to implementing such a service and the solutions we devised to address them. Finally, we also present experimental results we obtained from a preliminary testbed evaluation that encourages the prosecution of this work.

Nowadays it is common practice to handle any type of file with the personal computer. The introduction of mobile devices in modern life opened the doors to the possibility to do that ubiquitously, fostering a vast plethora of new entertainment applications. Unfortunately, the storage capacity of these devices is limited; it may hence be useful to have the possibility to store the files on the web and retrieve them at any time and anywhere. To satisfy this need, we have created FTP4Android. Our solution provides smartphone users with the illusion of having an infinite memory on their devices by storing their files on remote servers. To speed up the transfer process both in upload and download, parallel transmissions to/from different servers are performed. To demonstrate how this technology could be used for entertainment purposes, we have devised a treasure hunt application for mobile users based on our FTP4Android.

In the last decades mobile phones have evolved into powerful devices able to bring Internet services into our pockets. Following this trend, a popular application as gaming has extended its domain from home computers and consoles to the mobile realm. Indeed, mobile games embody a successful application for smartphones able to engage millions of subscribers worldwide. The next step is the creation of a new generation of mobile games, representing more than just a tiny version of home entertainment blockbusters; the ubiquitous use and the interesting features (i.e., camera, gyroscope, connectivity, GPS, etc.) of mobile phones create unprecedented opportunities for completely new kinds of gaming experience. As a proof of concept, we have created an application for mobile phones exploiting their camera and connectivity as available in every modern smartphone to digitally replicate and enhance an outdoor game for children that would not be playable through a desktop PC.

The specific features of inter-vehicular communications are allowing the deployment of a broad gamut of possible applications including traffic control, road safety and in-car entertainment. At the basis of all this lies the improvement of VANET-based transmission techniques that are becoming technologically mature. Within this context, in this paper we provide an experimental comparison between two of the most effectual algorithms whose aim is that of quickly broadcasting messages throughout a given platoon of vehicles. The most prominent characteristic of both the algorithms under investigation is that they were designed for wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, with in mind only realistic transmission conditions (that is, asymmetric and variable vehicles' transmission ranges). Even if both algorithms were conceived based on the idea to span application messages as far as possible, while minimizing the number of relaying vehicles, our extensive analysis demonstrates that one of the two outperforms the other.

We present an overview or the video games available at the Film Library of Bologna. This institution, in collaboration with the University of Bologna, has a whole collateral branch dedicated to the video games, as they can be considered a recreational activity somehow related to movies. This collection of video games conceptually starts from the ones that are strictly connected to movies, and then expands to a wider class of video games. A video game could be related with a movie either as its direct inspiration, its prequel or collateral plot, or also be created as a direct consequence of that movie. The expansion of the collection available in the Library includes a historical set of video games. In this paper we discuss the historical perspective of the relationship between technology and video games, providing a complete historical view of the video games by means of the titles and the consoles available in the Library. Several dedicated consoles are still in working conditions and could be used by the visitors of the Library.

Infrastructure networks like Internet have some coverage gaps (e.g. rural areas) where no service connectivity is provided. Cellular networks could be used in alternative but they usually associate their services with a usage cost. Nowadays, the growing number of mobile devices equipped with a wireless interface and the end-user trend to shift toward wireless technology has opened new possibilities for networking. Opportunistic networking seems a feasible solution in filling in these coverage gaps by providing service connectivity where it is not sustained by an infrastructure. In this context we provide a delay tolerant platform that ensures service connectivity where it is absent. Our approach follows the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) paradigm by implementing a store-and-forward communication model between mobile users and carrier entities (e.g. buses), where a user delegates the carrier a task (bundle), the carrier stores it locally and whenever service connectivity is available (e.g. wi-fi at the bus station) tries to accomplish it, successively notifying the user of the task output next time they encounter again.

Most of future digital services for home and office users will be deployed and delivered through the Internet and wireless connectivity. However, employing regular access points (APs) and protocols will not allow an efficient coexistence among heterogeneous application flows. Indeed, real-time and elastic applications are (and will be) supported by different protocols and featured with different performance requirements: low perpacket delay for the former and high throughput for the latter. In this work, we present a work-in-progress evaluation of a new AP prototype able to guarantee a fast and smooth data delivery for real-time streams while maintaining a high throughput for TCP-based applications. Our approach is based on a userspace modification of the AP's code based on OpenWRT operating system so as to appropriately shape transiting network traffic. Preliminary experimental results confirm that our solution represents an optimal candidate to become the center of future wireless in-home scenarios.

From the advent of the digital era, new powerful technologies have shown, on one hand, important progresses towards the mankind necessity and, on the other hand, a progressive isolation of individuals. In this work, we present a social application we have developed to support people with disabilities. Our application leverages on the popularity of smart phones and on the Web 2.0 paradigm to pervasively and invisibly collect information about the accessibility of city roads. This information is then used to provide a Google Maps-like service to determine an accessible path between any two locations for users with a certain disability.

Intervehicle communication (IVC) is emerging in research prominence for the interest that it is generating in all major car manufacturers and for the benefits that its inception will produce. The specific features of IVC will allow the deployment of a wide set of possible applications, which span from road safety to entertainment. Even if, on the one hand, these applications share the common need for fast multihop message propagation, on the other hand, they possess distinct characteristics in terms of generated network traffic. The state of the art of current research only proposes solutions specifically designed for a single application (or class) that is not directly extendable to a general IVC context. Instead, we claim that a privileged architecture exists, which is able to support the whole spectrum of application classes. To this aim, we propose a novel IVC architecture that adapts its functionalities to efficiently serve applications by quickly propagating their messages over a vehicular network. We conducted an extensive set of experiments that demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. As representative case studies, we considered two application classes that, for their network traffic characteristics, are at the opposite boundaries of the application spectrum: safety and entertainment.

As the technology available on cars is increasing, a wide range of applications, from safety to entertainment, are becoming available for this scenario. Many of these applications involve interactive multihop broadcast of messages over a certain area-of-interest. To this aim, specific solutions have been proposed to deal with the high mobility and density of a vehicular network scenario. In particular, we developed a simple, yet effective, solution for allowing cars to estimate their communication range through including few parameters in exchanged application messages. Then, this range estimation is exploited to reduce the number of hops and the delay required by a broadcast message to reach all the vehicles in the area-of-interest. Since so far the evaluation of our solution has been focused on simulations, we have now created a real testbed. Here, we report on results achieved through this real testbed, showing that they confirm the efficacy of our solution in estimating vehicles' transmission range and choosing the most appropriate forwarder for transmitted messages.

Internet and the latest correlated technologies, such as Web 2.0, represent inventions that have changed the world with their social contribution. Yet, digital divide and cyber-balkanization are Internet's discriminatory phenomena well known by field experts. In addition, we want now to raise the attention on the actual employment of these technologies: the vast potential within the Internet is currently dispersed in millions of applications devoted to frivolous and egocentric utilizations. Being (almost) the only use people have made of the most pervasive communication system ever made, this represents an unacceptable waste of opportunities. To revert this trend, we propose a novel utilization paradigm of Internet technologies which is aimed at liberating part of resources that are captured but not used by egocentric applications to give them back to a possible common (and altruistic) use.

The technology supporting multiplayer online games (MOGs) has greatly improved in the past few years. This represents great news both for players all over the world and for researchers that are struggling behind tough problems in real-time distributed systems. Indeed, MOGs represent a peculiar class of distributed systems, sharing features, requirements, challenges, and thereby also feasible solutions. To this aim, we focus on issues and state-of art solutions related to a crucial aspect in MOG deployment: the synchronization of its nodes. In particular, we review techniques able to guarantee that the system evolves in a quick and consistent way and highlight how they can be made more effective by exploiting specific game features. To further support this claim, we also present results from an experimental evaluation we performed.

Abstract — As the technology available on cars is increasing, a wide range of applications, from safety to entertainment, are becoming factually accessible to passengers. Many of these applications involves a one-to-many transmission model where a single car broadcasts a message that has to be forwarded, even with multiple hops, in a very short time to all the other cars located within a range of few kilometers from the source. Since the high mobility and density of a car network scenario, specific solutions need to be devised to choreograph a fast-delivery multihop broadcast. To this aim, we developed a practical and efficient technique that allows cars to estimate their communication range with the help of a very limited message exchange and exploit this information to reduce the number of transmissions, as well as the hops to be traversed, and hence the time, required by a broadcasted message to reach all the cars following the sender within a certain distance.

Abstract — Real-time applications are going to play a major role in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). In this context, nodes ’ IP addresses need to be automatically configured in a very small time and with a reduced need for re-configurations. Due to the very high mobility of vehicles, however, traditional mechanisms for address auto-configuration fail to perform well. Aimed at solving this problem, we propose a novel Leader-based scheme that exploits the topology of VANETs and a distributed DHCP service to guarantee fast and stable address configuration. Keywords: Ad-hoc networks, VANET, address configuration. I.

Successes and failures during rescue operations after hurricane Katrina and the Twin Towers attack demonstrated the importance of supporting first responders with adequate means to perform their operations in an effective and safe way. From a networking point of view, one of the main challenges is that of providing first responders with multimedia information about the emergency as soon as possible, even from a remote location. To this aim, we designed an inter-vehicular communication system able to quickly discover and transmit real time multimedia information from around a crisis area to approaching first responders' vehicles. As vehicular communications are highly variable in nature, we endowed our system with a transmission range estimator that is put to good use to reduce the number of hops that a video triggering message sent by a vehicle will experience to reach its destination. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme in reducing the message delivery time and the traffic generated.

Abstract — Ensuring fairness among players engaged in online games is a challenging task. Yet, it is a fundamental requirement that can make the difference between having customers that persist or desist in using this kind of application. Answering to this demand, we present here an event delivery mechanism among mirrored game servers able to effectively uplift the fairness degree during game sessions through the heterogenesis of ends in targeting interactivity. We also provide extensive results that sustain our claim.

Since the expansion of their market and their challenging requirements, massively multiplayer online games are gaining increasing attention in the scientific community. One of the key factors in this kind of application is represented by the ability to rapidly deliver game events among the various players over the network. Employing in this context mirrored game server architectures and adapting RED (random early detection) techniques borrowed from network queuing management, we are able to show sensible benefits in upholding interactivity and scalability, whilst preserving game state consistency and game evolution fluency at the player's side