Antonio Iera

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) - When social networks meet the Internet of Things: Concept, architecture and network characterization

Recently there has been quite a number of independent research activities that investigated the potentialities of integrating social networking concepts into Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. The resulting paradigm, named Social Internet of Things (SIoT), has the potential to support novel applications and networking services for the IoT in more effective and efficient ways. In this context, the main contributions of this paper are the following: (i) we identify appropriate policies for the establishment and the management of social relationships between objects in such a way that the resulting social network is navigable; (ii) we describe a possible architecture for the IoT that includes the functionalities required to integrate things into a social network; (iii) we analyze the characteristics of the SIoT network structure by means of simulations.

LTE for vehicular networking: a survey

A wide variety of applications for road safety and traffic efficiency are intended to answer the urgent call for smarter, greener, and safer mobility. Although IEEE 802.11p is considered the de facto standard for on-the-road communications, stakeholders have recently started to investigate the usability of LTE to support vehicular applications. In this article, related work and running standardization activities are scanned and critically discussed; strengths and weaknesses of LTE as an enabling technology for vehicular communications are analyzed; and open issues and critical design choices are highlighted to serve as guidelines for future research in this hot topic.

Information-centric networking for the internet of things: challenges and opportunities

In view of evolving the Internet infrastructure, ICN is promoting a communication model that is fundamentally different from the traditional IP address-centric model. The ICN approach consists of the retrieval of content by (unique) names, regardless of origin server location (i.e., IP address), application, and distribution channel, thus enabling in-network caching/replication and content-based security. The expected benefits in terms of improved data dissemination efficiency and robustness in challenging communication scenarios indicate the high potential of ICN as an innovative networking paradigm in the IoT domain. IoT is a challenging environment, mainly due to the high number of heterogeneous and potentially constrained networked devices, and unique and heavy traffic patterns. The application of ICN principles in such a context opens new opportunities, while requiring careful design choices. This article critically discusses potential ways toward this goal by surveying the current literature after presenting several possible motivations for the introduction of ICN in the context of IoT. Major challenges and opportunities are also highlighted, serving as guidelines for progress beyond the state of the art in this timely and increasingly relevant topic.

Call admission control and resource management issues for real-time VBR traffic in ATM-satellite networks

In this paper, a novel strategy for handling ATM connections of different natures, traffic profile, and QoS requirements in enhanced satellite systems is proposed. The conducted research starts from early studies on resource management in integrated terrestrial-satellite environments and focuses on a combined connection admission control/traffic resource management strategy for QoS provisioning to both real-time and non-real-time constant and variable bit rate sources. The resulting connection handling policy is dynamic, and effectively exploits the system bandwidth through the statistical multiplexing of traffic sources and a preemptive policy over the satellite air interface. The proposed strategy is suited for a generic integrated ATM-satellite system, although its effectiveness has been assessed on a multimedia satellite platform, based on the Ka-band payload and on-board processing.

Named data networking for IoT: An architectural perspective

The Named Data Networking (NDN) project is emerging as one of the most promising information-centric future Internet architectures. Besides NDN recognized potential as a content retrieval solution in wired and wireless domains, its innovative concepts, such as named content, name-based routing and in-network caching, particularly suit the requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) interconnecting billions of heterogeneous objects. IoT highly differs from todays Internet due to resource-constrained devices, massive volumes of small exchanged data, and traffic type diversity. The study in this paper addresses the design of a high-level NDN architecture, whose main components are overhauled to specifically meet the IoT challenges.

Adaptive Resource Allocation to Multicast Services in LTE Systems

This paper addresses the design of an adaptive resource allocation policy for the efficient delivery of multicast services in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The proposed approach overcomes the intrinsic inefficiencies of Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS) related to the different channel quality experienced by the involved users. The basic idea is to split any multicast group into subgroups and apply subgroup-based adaptive modulation and coding schemes, which enable a more efficient exploitation of multi-user diversity. The distribution of users into subgroups is determined by the solution of an optimization problem, aiming to improve the network throughput while guaranteeing fairness among multicast members.

Improving QoS and throughput in single- and multihop WLANs through dynamic traffic prioritization

Nowadays, research efforts are being put into the design of effective mechanisms to provide service quality differentiation in IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs. In this article we analyze the effects of augmenting the contention-based channel access mechanism of IEEE 802.11e through the assignment of dynamic traffic priorities, that adapt to either the applications quality requirements or the network congestion status. The aim is to show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed dynamic mechanism in a wireless ad hoc network, in both single-hop and multihop scenarios, under variable traffic and network load conditions.

Single Frequency-Based Device-to-Device-Enhanced Video Delivery for Evolved Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services

Despite of the undisputed benefits of the long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) networks, offering support for group-oriented services challenges the evolved multimedia broadcast multicast services (eMBMS) design in LTE-A. This is especially important when delivering video content with high bitrate requirements. The conventional multicast scheme (CMS) is proposed as a radio resource allocation solution for eMBMS to serve all multicast group members with the data rate supported by the receiver with the worst channel conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel radio resource management approach, the device-to-device (D2D)-enhanced CMS with single frequency (D2D-SF). This proposal extends the CMS with additional D2D communications in order to increase the aggregate data rate of the cell, while also maintaining the typical CMS short-term fairness. D2D-SF makes use of one or more mobile subscriber devices as forwarding devices (FD) to retransmit the data received from the base station (BS) over direct local links to other members of the multicast group. The proposed solution supports both high-rate modulation and coding schemes on the downlink from BS to FDs, and reaches cell-edge devices (hence, experiencing worse channel conditions) through high-performing D2D links (improving this experience). Testing shows how the single frequency-based D2D CMS paradigm proposed, complemented by two novel strategies for selecting FDs, achieves significant enhancements of the overall performance when delivering video content compared to both the state-of-the-art multicast solutions and novel solutions that do not employ a single-frequency paradigm.

Smart things in the social loop: Paradigms, technologies, and potentials

Abstract Information about human social activities and relationships are exploited by an ever increasing number of proposed applications and protocols in several scenarios, given the consequent increase in the system performance. Examples are data transmission over delay tolerant networks, content recommendation in search engines, and advertisement of products and services. An emerging field where social networks are being exploited is the Internet of Things, where smart objects connect to the network to bring the real world into the virtual dimension. Objects capable to communicate on social network sites are able to enter into their owners’ social loop so as to automatically publish information of interest for selected communities of people and to perform some related automatic actions. In so doing, not only can objects be part of the human social networks but they can also build their own social network. As a consequence, interactions among them can be fostered towards the development of complex services for the direct benefit of people. Accordingly, objects mimic the human behavior towards a scalable and effective service discovery and composition as well as trustworthiness management. On the basis of the importance achieved by this trend in the last couple of years, in this paper we intend to review the adopted approaches towards the exploitation of social network concepts by the Internet of Things, the technologies behind these, and the potentialities.

Understanding the Internet of Things: definition, potentials, and societal role of a fast evolving paradigm

Abstract The high penetration rate of new technologies in all the activities of everyday life is fostering the belief that for any new societal challenge there is always an ICT solution able to successfully deal with it. Recently, the solution that is proposed almost anytime is the “Internet of Things” (IoT). This apparent panacea of the ICT world takes different aspects on and, actually, is identified with different (often very different) technological solutions. As a result, many think that IoT is just RFIDs, others think that it is sensor networks, and yet others that it is machine-to-machine communications. In the meanwhile, industrial players are taking advantage of the popularity of IoT to use it as a very trendy brand for technology solutions oriented to the consumer market. The scientific literature sometimes does not help much in clarifying, as it is rich in definitions of IoT often discordant between them. Objective of this paper is to present the evolutionary stages, i.e., generations, that have characterized the development of IoT, along with the motivations of their triggering. Besides, it analyzes the role that IoT can play in addressing the main societal challenges and the set of features expected from the relevant solutions. The final objective is to give a modern definition of the phenomenon, which de facto shows a strong pervasive nature, and, if not well understood in its theories, technologies, methodologies, and real potentials, then runs the risk of being regarded with suspicion and, thus, rejected by users.