The paper presents the prototype of an innovative system, called the “Unattended-Operation Detector” (UOD), developed on top of an Oil & Gas Transportation IoT platform managing a sensor network installed on over 3,000 tank trucks. The system, integrated as a new sensor, runs a real-time Computer Vision algorithm to detect, through a camera, whether the operator attends the dangerous goods unloads, dramatically increasing the fuel handling safety levels. The paper motivates the UOD relevance in the application and technology context, shows the main design and implementation choices, reports the experimental results of the first prototype mounted on a tanker, and discusses the product perspectives.

The paper presents a new service paradigm for Vehicle Communication Platforms (VCPs), based on the Sensor Cloud concept. According to this paradigm, VCPs make available their components, including vehicle sensor and devices, to third-party vehicle monitoring applications, as virtual resources. We prototyped a Sensor Cloud service on the Click & Find™ VCP, currently supporting real-time Intelligent Truck Monitoring (ITM) services on about one thousand tank trucks for fuel distribution in Europe. The paper presents the Sensor Cloud service architecture and implementation, discussing the main benefits delivered to the ITM domain.

The paper presents the Click & Find platform, specifically designed to support advanced Remote Vehicle Monitoring and Control applications. The platform currently provides the real-time monitoring of over five hundreds fuel delivery tanker trucks working for many Oil Companies in Europe. The paper focuses on the innovative platform features, i.e., the three-tier architecture and the rule-based interface.

The passive estimation of Internet access capacity is interesting both from a scientific perspective, because it requires the development of techniques and tools to extract such a capacity from a noisy set of traffic measurements; and from an industrial perspective, because it supports, in principle, the possibility to measure the Service Levels of IP Access Service offered by Internet service providers. This paper proposes models, techniques and tools aimed at passively estimating the maximum achievable downlink network-layer rate (capacity) of an access link to the Internet from inside a network. We propose a method that extends the well-known packet-dispersion approach to network capacity estimation by considering longer TCP packet sequences to minimize the impact of measurement noise and to obtain reliable estimation without the need of a large amount of data. The proposed approach has been validated on some small-scale experiments performed on residential ADSL lines under different interfering traffic conditions.

The GPRS (general packet radio service) broad availability is driving a widespread development of mobile telemetry systems for fleet management, supply chain management and dangerous goods monitoring applications. In this paper we present the results of extensive measurements of the GPRS network-layer uplink latency performed over a four-month period from about fifty road trucks using telemetry service, providing an uplink latency characterization in a moving vehicle environment. The results show the relationship between vehicle speed and latency. Furthermore, the performances of the stop-and-wait in a moving vehicle environment are evaluated in order to design a variant of such a protocol based on a vehicle speed-aware retransmission timeout.

The paper presents the work in progress of a project funded by the European Commission's aimed at enabling the integration between software components running on onboard truck terminals and ground based information systems to increase safety, efficiency and quality of road infrastructures. Despite the fact that the system originates in a automotive context, the architecture can be used for a wide range of control applications characterized by mobile software components. The system architecture goals are to collect vehicle data and make such data accessible from external information system through open application interfaces over standard wireless network technology.

In this paper, we consider the evolution of telephone networks from time-division multiplexing circuit switching to packet switching and, in particular, to packet switching-based on Internet Protocol (IP-supported telephony). We analyze IP-supported telephony design solutions by proposing a layered reference model in which each layer is associated to a subset of the functions that support telephony. We use the reference model to establish a terminology and a framework for the comparison of the design solutions. We group the design solutions in scenarios and compare them in terms of the reference model proposed. We then focus on IP telephony, in which IP is used in telephone company networks, and on Internet telephony, in which the Internet is used to support telephony. We show that they both can be seen as implementations of the same architecture, which consists of a set of components, associated to functions, and of the interactions among these components. We then consider the issue of voice-data integration and analyze the variety of design solutions that can be adopted to integrate voice and data.

This paper describes the deployment of a service oriented architecture in the specific context of the "business communities" i.e. communities of heterogeneous actors that cooperate in the same business area. The architecture is based on XML and Web Services technologies. More specifically the paper analyzes the structure and the requirements of business communities in general, derives the requirements of the architecture and describes its implementation. Finally a case study is presented to show how the architecture has been implemented for the business community of the Port of Genoa characterized by users operating in the cargo and transport business area.

While in the last decade image and video processing (IVP) have gradually moved from special purpose computer architectures based on massive parallelism (MP) to general purpose computer architectures based on instruction-level parallelism (ILP), a new challenge is now to be faced by the IVP community, namely the application of IVP also in small-size embedded systems (e.g., video players, smart cameras, digital diaries, etc.) based on ILP processors. Because of the requirements of low size, weight, and power consumption, these embedded systems do not take advantage of processors that feature advanced dynamic code optimization mechanisms such as those based on instruction reordering and register renaming. On the other hand, the compile time techniques of present generation compilers do not appear to be aggressive enough to exploit the massive parallelism of IVP tasks in ILP architectures, thus leading to inefficient programs. This paper analyzes the efficiency of IVP programs on ILP CPUs. In particular it presents: (1) a reference model for the efficient design and implementation of highly parallel programs, such as the ones of the IVP domain; (2) an analysis of the inefficiencies of IVP programs implemented on ILP processors; and (3) a set of techniques, deriving from the reference model, that overcome these inefficiencies. These techniques are based on a novel computing paradigm called bucket processing.

Optimizing compilers targeted to instruction level parallel (ILP) architectures schedule program instructions in such a way so as to minimize the number of execution stalls, called bubbles, that occur during program execution because of hazards. These bubbles are estimated by compilers on the basis of the target processor functional model. Unfortunately, these functional models are often inaccurate, especially in retargetable compilers, and thus lead the compiler to imprecise estimations. This paper presents a technique that "detects" the bubbles by observing program execution in a set of preliminary runs, instead of estimating them. The applications of this technique range from performance evaluation of programs and efficiency analysis of functional models to novel techniques of profile-driven code optimization. The paper presents the technique and shows its applicability in a case study and a set of experiments.

The recent progress of RISC technology has led to the feeling that a significant percentage of image processing applications, which in the past required the use of special purpose computer architectures or of ad hoc hardware, can now be implemented in software on low cost general purpose platforms. We decided to undertake the study described in this paper to understand the extent to which this feeling corresponds to reality. We selected a set of reference RISC-based systems to represent RISC technology, and identified a set of basic image processing tasks to represent the image processing domain. We measured the performance and studied the behavior of the reference systems in the execution of the basic image processing tasks by running a number of experiments based on different program organizations. The results of these experiments are summarized in a table, which can be used by image processing application designers to evaluate whether RISC-based platforms are able to deliver the computing power required for a specific application.