Gianluca Mazzilli

Network design and characterization of a Wireless Active Guardrail System

This paper deals with the design and characterization of a network architecture for an intelligent transportation system called Wireless Active Guardrail System, WAGS. A protocol stack called Blip has been applied under an open-source embedded operating system (named TinyOS) in order to comply with the requirements of WAGS. A routing protocol has been deployed to implement mesh networking using as hardware module the IRIS mote platform. In order to validate the WAGS networking requirements, different tests have been carried out regarding time-delay measurements in case of multi-hop and round-trip of data packets. For the designed network architecture, several results obtained by simulation and laboratory measurements are reported.

Investigating the on-board data processing for IMU-based sensors in motion tracking for rehabilitation

This paper investigates the effects of shifting computation-intensive workload for motion tracking based on sensor network from a dedicated remote server to an embedded microcontroller. The importance of battery life is exacerbated for devices designed to work in biomedical field as the prolonged operability could make a vital difference in mobile contexts. On-board processing usually drives to less communication, so the balance between the power consumed by more operations and that saved by limiting the radio transmissions has been evaluated. A measurement station has been realized to measure the energy budget needed to let more patients be monitored simultaneously and, at the same time, to increase the number of sensor nodes working together in the network. Finally, functional equivalence of the implementation has been proven.

Method for compensating the effect of disturbances on magnetometer measurements: experimental results

In this paper, a method for compensating the effect of long-lasting time variant disturbances on the measurements provided by the magnetometer embedded on a smartphone is proposed. The work deals with: (i) a comparison, in terms of convergence time, of two minimization techniques for the estimation of the magnetometer compensation parameters, and (ii) the design of a test bench to validate the method. The results of experimental tests are reported and discussed.

An IoT-enabled multi-sensor multi-user system for human motion measurements

New applicative scenarios like military, medical and sport often require that human motion of multiple users is simultaneously monitored by multiple observers. To fulfill such requirements, a solution that takes advantages from the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and the Publish-Subscribe communication paradigm is proposed. According to the IoT approach, each Motion Tracking Sub-system and each Measurement Presentation Sub-system is an object of the IoT and has communication capabilities. The selected Publish-Subscribe communication paradigm allows the delivery of specific measurement information only to what the observers are interested in. This approach avoids the congestion of the network with unnecessary traffic. Preliminary experimental test results assess the suitability of the proposed approach for the tracking of human activities.

Power consumption analysis of a Wireless Sensor Network for road safety

This paper deals with the power consumption analysis of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for road safety consisting of several sensor and actuator nodes embedded in guardrails. In order to design the photovoltaic power supply system of the WSN, the power consumption of each node has been characterized by means of a suitable measurement station. Furthermore, a network simulator has been designed and developed to evaluate the power consumption of the entire WSN according to a specified number of road events. The specifications of the energy storage of the photovoltaic system obtained from the analysis of the results are also reported in the paper.