Gianluca Rizzo

Internet of Things in the 5G Era: Enablers, Architecture, and Business Models

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.

SDN coordination for CCN and FC content dissemination in VANETs

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks has a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising and parking notifications, to traffic and emergency warnings. This heterogeneity requires optimizing content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles to deliver data with short latency and without jeopardizing network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine Content Centric Networking (CCN) and Floating Content (FC) enable new and efficient solutions to this issue. Moreover, we describe how a network architecture based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) can support both CCN and FC by coordinating distributed caching strategies, by optimizing the packet forwarding process and the availability of floating data items. For each scenario analyzed, we highlight the main research challenges open, and we describe a few possible solutions.

Content and Context Aware Strategies for QoS Support in VANETs

The surging interest in autonomous coordinateddriving and in proactive safety services, exploiting the wealth ofsensing and computing resources which are gradually permeatingthe urban and vehicular environments, is making provisioning ofhigh levels of QoS in vehicular networks an urgent issue. At thesame time, the spreading model of a smart car, with a wealthof infotainment applications, calls for architectures for vehicularcommunications capable of supporting traffic with a diverse setof performance requirements. So far efforts have been revolvedtowards enabling a single specific QoS level. But the issues of howto support traffic with tight QoS requirements (no packet loss, and delays inferior to 1ms), and of designing a system capable atthe same time of efficiently sustaining such traffic together withtraffic from infotainment applications, are still open. In this paper we present the approach taken in the SNFCONTACT project in order to tackle these issues. The goal ofthe project is to investigate how an architecture for vehicularcommunications which integrates content-centric networking, software-defined networking as well as context aware floatingcontent schemes can properly support the very diverse set ofapplication and services currently envisioned for the vehicularenvironment.

Impact of Mobility on the Performance of Context-Aware Applications Using Floating Content

The growth of mobile computing and the evolution of smart user devices are progressively driving applications towards “context-awareness”, i.e., towards behaviors that change according to variations in context. Such applications use information that is restricted in space and time, making their communication requirements very different from those of conventional applications, so that opportunistic schemes are better suited to this case than more conventional communications. In this work we consider an opportunistic communication scheme called “Floating Content” (FC), which was specifically designed for server-less distributed context-aware applications, and we refine our previous investigation of the viability of FC for context-aware mobile applications, by considering the impact of different mobility models on the performance of FC. In particular, we consider four different mobility models, and, by using extensive simulation experiments, we investigate the performance of three different categories of context-aware applications that use FC. We also compare the simulation results to the performance predictions of our previously proposed simple analytical model. Results show that good performance can be achieved in content distribution by using FC under a variety of mobility models. They also show that a simple analytical model can provide useful performance predictions even for complex and realistic mobility models, although some application-specific characteristics might call for specialized models to improve the accuracy of performance estimates.

Scalable Approaches to Integration in Heterogeneous IoT and M2M Scenarios

The Internet of Things (IoT) opens new perspectives for the Machine-To-Machine communications, as it brings to settings with a large and heterogeneous set of devices. This makes integration of such diverse technologies a challenging task. A typical solution to this problem is represented by universal gateways, which provide internal semantics for protocol translation. However such approach is bound to be challenged in future IoT scenarios, as it brings substantial performance impairments in settings with very large number of devices and of technologies. We address these limitations, by proposing two novel approaches. A first is based on distributing the management of the different technologies among gateways. A second approach makes use of Web Service delegation, with gateways acting only as a connecting point between the entities and some service that can interpret the information exchanged. We implement and validate experimentally these approaches, showing that they both scale sensibly better than the traditional approach, guaranteeing acceptable performance even with a high degree of heterogeneity. Moreover, we identify the criteria which should be considered when choosing between the two proposed approaches. Our results establish a set of guidelines for integration in large and heterogeneous IoT scenarios.

Performance Modeling of Vehicular Floating Content in Urban Settings

Among the proposed opportunistic content sharing services, Floating Content (FC) is of special interest for the vehicular environment, not only for cellular traffic offloading, but also as a natural communication paradigm for location-based context-aware vehicular applications. Existing results on the performance of vehicular FC have focused on content persistence, without addressing the key issues of the effectiveness with which content is replicated and made available, and of what are the conditions which enable acceptable FC performance in the vehicular environment. This work presents a first analytical model of FC performance in vehicular networks in urban settings. It is based on a variation of the random waypoint (RWP) mobility model, and it does not require a model of road grid geometry for its parametrization. We validate our model extensively, through numerical simulations on real-world traces, showing its accuracy on a variety of mobility patterns and traffic conditions. Through analysis and simulations, we show the feasibility of the FC paradigm in realistic urban settings over a wide range of traffic conditions.

A centralized approach for setting floating content parameters in VANETs

Floating Content (FC) has recently been proposed as an attractive application for mobile networks, such as VANETs, to operate opportunistic and distributed content sharing over a given geographic area, namely Anchor Zone (AZ). FC performances are tightly dependent on the AZ size, which in literature is classically chosen by the node that generates the floating message. In the present work, we propose a method to improve FC performances by optimizing the AZ size with the support of a Software Defined Network (SDN) controller, which collects mobility information, such as speed and position, of the vehicles in its coverage range.

NOSE: A NOmadic Scalable Ecosystem for Pervasive Sensing, Computing and Communication.

The Smart City paradigm is progressively shaping the way we interact with other citizens, with institutions, as well as the way in which all kind of resources are managed in an urban setting. However, the high cost of dedicated sensing, computing and communication infrastructure, represents one of the main obstacles to the adoption of the Smart City paradigm in small cities and large, distributed districts, where resides the vast majority of the world population. In this paper we present a first implementation of a platform for nomadic sensing, which exploits the “moving infrastructure” of a city in order to implement the sensing, computing and communication functionalities required by smart city services, in a cost-effective way. This paper describes the architecture of the NOSE system, and the main lessons learned during the first steps of its implementation, deployment, and experimental validation. In particular, we show that the main technical challenges are due to the lack of devices conceived for reliable mobile operation (sensing, computing) and to the difficulty in achieving high levels of accuracy in measurements while moving.

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Adaptive and Context Aware Content Dissemination in VANETs

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) has the potential to enable a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising, traffic and emergency warnings to infotainment. This variety in applications and services calls for mechanisms able to optimize content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles, without jeopardizing network resources. Content Centric Networking (CCN), takes advantage of inherent content redundancy in the network in order to decrease the utilization of network resources, improve response time and content availability, coping efficiently with some of the effects of mobility. Floating Content (FC), on the other hand, holds potential to implement efficiently a large amount of vehicular applications thanks to its property of geographic content replication, while Software Defined Networking (SDN), is an attractive solution for the lack of flexibility and dynamic programmability that characterizes current VANET architectures. By implementing a logical centralization of the network, SDN enables dynamic and efficient management of network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine CCN, FC and SDN enable an innovative adaptive VANET architecture able to efficiently accommodate to intermittent connectivity, fluctuating node density and mobility patterns on one side and application performance and network resources on the other side, aiming to achieve high QoS. For each scenario, we highlight the main open research challenges, and we describe possible solutions to improve content dissemination and reduce replication without affecting content availability.

Test Set Validation for Home Electrical Signal Disaggregation

In order to enable demand response schemes for residential and industrial users, it is crucial to be able to predict and monitor each component of the total power consumption of a household or of an industrial site over time. We used the cross-validation method which is a model validation technique for assessing how the results of a statistical analysis will generalize to an independent data set. It is mainly used in settings where the goal is prediction, and one wants to estimate how accurately a predictive model will perform in practice. We exploit Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques in order to provide behavior patterns of the variables identified. This work presents a review Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques and describe the results of recognition patterns used for the identification of electrical devices. The proposed method has been validated on an experimental setting and using direct measurements of appliances consumption, proving that it allows achieving a high level of accuracy in load disaggregation.