Antonino Orsino

A Constrained Coalition Formation Game for Multihop D2D Content Uploading

This paper investigates relay-based schemes in cellular systems, where multihop device-to-device (D2D) communications are exploited for content uploading toward the eNodeB. All user equipments (UEs) are sources of their own content and form a multihop D2D chain, with the head of the chain being in charge of uploading all the generated content to the eNodeB. By pooling the cellular radio resources assigned to the D2D chain and by using high-quality short-range radio links, the proposed cooperative content uploading scheme guarantees lower upload delays than in the traditional cellular mode operation. To model the D2D chain formation in a cell and to best characterize self-interested users concerned about their own payoff, a constrained coalition formation game is defined, where each UE is a player whose cost is identified as the content upload time. The solution of the game determines the stable feasible partition for the UEs in the cell. We demonstrate through simulations that with this solution the content uploading time is reduced by 52% with respect to the traditional cellular mode.

Energy Efficient IoT Data Collection in Smart Cities Exploiting D2D Communications

Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of “smart” objects disseminated from the largest “Smart City” to the smallest “Smart Home”. In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena providing a large coherent infrastructure and a wide wireless connectivity to the devices. However, since LTE-A was originally designed to support high data rates and large data size, novel solutions are required to enable an efficient use of radio resources to convey small data packets typically exchanged by IoT applications in “smart” environments. On the other hand, the typically high energy consumption required by cellular communications is a serious obstacle to large scale IoT deployments under cellular connectivity as in the case of Smart City scenarios. Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are considered as a viable solution to reduce the energy consumption for the devices. The particular approach presented in this paper consists in appointing one of the IoT smart devices as a collector of all data from a cluster of objects using D2D links, thus acting as an aggregator toward the eNodeB. By smartly adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on the communication links, we will show it is possible to maximize the radio resource utilization as a function of the total amount of data to be sent. A further benefit that we will highlight is the possibility to reduce the transmission power when a more robust MCS is adopted. A comprehensive performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios will testify the achievable gains in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization in the envisaged D2D-based IoT data collection.

Effects of Heterogeneous Mobility on D2D- and Drone-Assisted Mission-Critical MTC in 5G

mcMTC is starting to play a central role in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem and have the potential to create high-revenue businesses, including intelligent transportation systems, energy/ smart grid control, public safety services, and high-end wearable applications. Consequently, in the 5G of wireless networks, mcMTC have imposed a wide range of requirements on the enabling technology, such as low power, high reliability, and low latency connectivity. Recognizing these challenges, the recent and ongoing releases of LTE systems incorporate support for lowcost and enhanced coverage, reduced latency, and high reliability for devices at varying levels of mobility. In this article, we examine the effects of heterogeneous user and device mobility -- produced by a mixture of various mobility patterns -- on the performance of mcMTC across three representative scenarios within a multi-connectivity 5G network. We establish that the availability of alternative connectivity options, such as D2D links and drone-assisted access, helps meet the requirements of mcMTC applications in a wide range of scenarios, including industrial automation, vehicular connectivity, and urban communications. In particular, we confirm improvements of up to 40 percent in link availability and reliability with the use of proximate connections on top of the cellular-only baseline.

OpenFlow over wireless networks: Performance analysis

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow represent the most commonly deployed approaches of the so called Programmable Networks. SDN is an emerging network architecture, which performs the subdivision of control plane and data plane and allows greater speed, greater scalability, and greater ductility in terms of routing and forwarding. OpenFlow, instead, is an SDN component that characterizes the communication between a controller and the devices within the SDN network. Although SDN and OpenFlow work efficiently in wired networks, the integration of these new paradigms over the wireless networks represents still and open issue. In fact, in a dense wireless scenario with an high number of base stations and a limited radio spectrum is still difficult to manage in a proper way operations such as radio spectrum allocation, interference management, handover management, and load balancing among the cells. In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the SDN and OpenFlow over wireless networks. The aim is to evaluate potential advantages introduced by the SDN architecture in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as throughput, packet loss, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio. An exhaustive simulation campaign has been conducted through the OMNeT++ network simulator framework by taking into account the new generation IP-based broadband wireless networks. The obtained results shown that the SDN architecture with OpenFlow introduces benefits in the network in term of resource management, transmission data-rate and end-to-end delay.

D2D in LTE vehicular networking: System model and upper bound performance

The Device-to-Device (D2D) communication over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular system is emerging as a key technology to support safety and traffic efficiency applications in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs). By offering a flexible usage of the radio interface, it allows vehicles to directly communicate each other, while experiencing low-latency and highly reliable data delivery. Anyway, the impact that application traffic patterns and transmission settings have on the overall performance is still unclear and in this context it is necessary a deep study for driving future research activities. To this end, the present contribution proposes a flexible methodology that characterizes, from a system level point of view, the upper bound performance of vehicular D2D communications as a function of the application, the access layer settings, and the channel behavior. Model outcomes have been used to provide insights about the most suitable transmission parameters, the achievable transmission range, and the supported vehicles density in VANETs scenarios.

Trust-based and social-aware coalition formation game for multihop data uploading in 5G systems

Abstract In this paper a trust-based coalition formation game is proposed to design opportunistic hop-by-hop forwarding schemes, relying on cellular Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, to enhance content uploading services. The User Equipments (UEs) are sources of data to be uploaded to a cellular base station (eNodeB) and are assumed to be rational self-interested players as they aim at maximizing their own utility. To this aim, the UEs cooperate to opportunistically implement proximity-based data exchanges where the presence of malicious nodes in the network is a constant threat for the successful cooperation. To cope with this issue, reliability and reputation notions are considered to model the level of trust among the players. Taking inspiration from the recent Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, social-awareness of the devices is spotted as a key parameter to effectively define the wished trustworthiness. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated through a simulative analysis showing a relevant reduction in the data loss due to malicious behavior of a subset of the devices. In particular, up to 86% reduction in terms of data loss is obtained with respect to the case where the proposed trust model is not implemented. Moreover, the trust-based and social-aware solution also guarantees higher gains in terms of the uploading time for the devices taking part of the cooperative D2D-based content uploading.

Multimedia Content Delivery for Emerging 5G-Satellite Networks

Multimedia content delivery over satellite systems is considered as a promising service in emerging 5G networks. The aim of this paper is to design a novel radio resource management algorithm for efficiently managing multicast multimedia content transmission over satellite network. The proposed approach performs the spectrum management on a per-group basis, by splitting multicast terminals into different subgroups according to the experienced channel qualities. We demonstrate that subgrouping policy defined by the authors as multicast subgrouping-maximum satisfaction index (MS-MSI), based on a new metric (i.e., MSI), overcomes the weakness of the previous techniques proposed in the literature and provides the best tradeoff between user throughput and fairness. As a further result, we demonstrate that MS-MSI is robust to the long propagation delay of satellite links. An extensive simulation campaign has been conducted by considering several satellite environments.

A novel security-centric framework for D2D connectivity based on spatial and social proximity

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is one of the most promising innovations in the next-generation wireless ecosystem, which improves the degrees of spatial reuse and creates novel social opportunities for users in proximity. As standardization behind network-assisted D2D technology takes shape, it becomes clear that security of direct connectivity is one of the key concerns on the way to its ultimate user adoption. This is especially true when a personal user cluster (that is, a smartphone and associated wearable devices) does not have a reliable connection to the cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that embraces security of geographically proximate user clusters. More specifically, we employ game-theoretic mechanisms for appropriate user clustering taking into account both spatial and social notions of proximity. Further, our information security procedures implemented on top of this clustering scheme enable continuous support for secure direct communication even in case of unreliable/unavailable cellular connectivity. Explicitly incorporating the effects of user mobility, we numerically evaluate the proposed framework by confirming that it has the potential to substantially improve the resulting system-wide performance.

LTE-direct vs. WiFi-direct for machine-type communications over LTE-A systems

Current and future releases of 3GPP standards will include enhancements in LTE-Advanced for machine-type communications (MTC). The main reason for this new trend is the fact that 5G wireless systems will need to enable the coexistence between MTC and human-type communications (HTC). Therefore, novel solutions are needed to efficiently exploit the radio resources for MTC, considering, among others, the need to optimize transmissions for small data packets. With this aim, this paper addresses the use of short-range device-to-device (D2D) communications as enabling technology to efficiently manage the radio spectrum and to reduce the energy consumption of MTC devices. We consider a scenario where MTC devices are grouped in a cluster; among the cluster members, one terminal acts as aggregator in charge for (i) receiving data from neighboring terminals via D2D links and (ii) relaying the aggregated data to the base station via macro-cellular link. The main contribution of this paper is to compare the performances of the two most popular D2D technologies, i.e., WiFi-Direct and LTE-Direct, used to transmit data toward the aggregator. The performance evaluation in terms of latency and energy efficiency has been conducted in a wide set of scenarios by varying the number of clustered devices and the data to upload per single MTC device.

NB-IoT for D2D-Enhanced Content Uploading with Social Trustworthiness in 5G Systems †

Future fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems are set to give a strong boost to the large-scale deployment of Internet of things (IoT). In the view of a future converged 5G-IoT infrastructure, cellular IoT solutions such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and device-to-device (D2D) communications are key technologies for supporting IoT scenarios and applications. However, some open issues still need careful investigation. An example is the risk of threats to privacy and security when IoT mobile services rely on D2D communications. To guarantee efficient and secure connections to IoT services involving exchange of sensitive data, reputation-based mechanisms to identify and avoid malicious devices are fast gaining ground. In order to tackle the presence of malicious nodes in the network, this paper introduces reliability and reputation notions to model the level of trust among devices engaged in an opportunistic hop-by-hop D2D-based content uploading scheme. To this end, social awareness of devices is considered as a means to enhance the identification of trustworthy nodes. A performance evaluation study shows that the negative effects due to malicious nodes can be drastically reduced by adopting the proposed solution. The performance metrics that proved to benefit from the proposed solution are data loss, energy consumption, and content uploading time.