Fast Cell Discovery in mm-wave 5G Networks with Context Information

The exploitation of mm-wave bands is one of the key-enabler for 5G mobile radio networks. However, the introduction of mm-wave technologies in cellular networks is not straightforward due to harsh propagation conditions that limit the mm-wave access availability. Mm-wave technologies require high-gain antenna systems to compensate for high path loss and limited power. As a consequence, directional transmissions must be used for cell discovery and synchronization processes: this can lead to a non-negligible access delay caused by the exploration of the cell area with multiple transmissions along different directions. The integration of mm-wave technologies and conventional wireless access networks with the objective of speeding up the cell search process requires new 5G network architectural solutions. Such architectures introduce a functional split between C-plane and U-plane, thereby guaranteeing the availability of a reliable signaling channel through conventional wireless technologies that provides the opportunity to collect useful context information from the network edge. In this article, we leverage the context information related to user positions to improve the directional cell discovery process. We investigate fundamental trade-offs of this process and the effects of the context information accuracy on the overall system performance. We also cope with obstacle obstructions in the cell area and propose an approach based on a geo-located context database where information gathered over time is stored to guide future searches. Analytic models and numerical results are provided to validate proposed strategies.Comment: 14 pages, submitted to IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computin

Paesaggio e insediamenti storici alpini: i borghi valdostani lungo la viabilità trasfrontaliera

Il saggio analizza il ruolo dei borghi alpini lungo la viabilità transfrontaliera del Ducato d'Aosta nella costruzione di una certa immagine di paesaggi

The ways to Superga. History and Design Studio projects for year 2012-2013

The e-book, specifically imaginated for foreign students, presents a selection of essays by the "History and Design Studio" teachers and collaborators to underline methodologically the relevance of the historical approach to the design. The specificity of the imposant baroque architecture of Superga Church, at the top of Torino Hills (the so called "Montagne de Turin" by ancient cartography) is related to the contest and to the city. Design proposals and solutions, equally are strongly connected to the landscape analysis. The book then proposes the students answer to these complex topics by a series of "atlas" interpretations and design suggestions. The deep analysis on cultural components, architectural monuments and urban organization is surely the main force of these projects in which the few projected solutions are able to dialogue truly with the contest. The presentations by the Course director and by the resposable of the lanscape administration (Parco del Po e della collina torinese) show the importante of the cooperation between associations and university to propose solutions able to dialogue with the complexity of nowadays cultural contest. With contributions by Fulvio Capurso, Maria Vittoria Cattaneo, Vittorio Defabiani, Luca Malvicino, Rachele Vicario and presentations by the Director of Studies and Superga Park responsible and collaborato

GIS and Land History: the documentation of the ancient Aosta Dukedom

GIS technology has been recognised as one of the best instruments able to join and relate data coming from different disciplines involved in a documentation process of Cultural Heritage objects. The RecorDIM (Recording, Documentation and Information Management) project defined some general rules to be followed when GIS technology is used to share documentation results among all the possible users (e.g. conservators, restorers, land planners, etc.). The aim of the paper is to show a real application of the proposed rules inside an Interreg III-A (community initiative seeking to favour the harmonious and even development of European territory by encouraging cross-border cooperation) ALCOTRA (Alpi Latine COoperazione TRAnsfrontaliera) project managed by the Italian Valle d'Aosta Region. The Valle d'Aosta Region assigned to the Politecnico di Torino research group (teachers of the High School on Cultural Heritage and Landscape) the goal of placing the results of the archaeological and historical investigations inside a not structured GIS files. This particular approach will allow the integration of the collected data in the regional GIS used for land planning and land risk assessment. This approach required a planning of the recording strategies adopted by the different specialists involved in the project and the structuring of the collected data in a way that could allow the dissemination of the results among all the land planners at every scale (from regional scale up to urban scale). The proposed approach will allow an easy and direct access to the results of historical and archaeological investigations to the specialists involved in the plan of future landscapes and land uses

The ways to Superga. History and Design Studio projects for year 2012-2013

The e-book, specifically imaginated for foreign students, presents a selection of essays by the "History and Design Studio" teachers and collaborators to underline methodologically the relevance of the historical approach to the design. The specificity of the imposant baroque architecture of Superga Church, at the top of Torino Hills (the so called "Montagne de Turin" by ancient cartography) is related to the contest and to the city. Design proposals and solutions, equally are strongly connected to the landscape analysis. The book then proposes the students answer to these complex topics by a series of "atlas" interpretations and design suggestions. The deep analysis on cultural components, architectural monuments and urban organization is surely the main force of these projects in which the few projected solutions are able to dialogue truly with the contest. The presentations by the Course director and by the resposable of the lanscape administration (Parco del Po e della collina torinese) show the importante of the cooperation between associations and university to propose solutions able to dialogue with the complexity of nowadays cultural contest. With contributions by Fulvio Capurso, Maria Vittoria Cattaneo, Vittorio Defabiani, Luca Malvicino, Rachele Vicario and presentations by the Director of Studies and Superga Park responsible and collaborator

Facing the Millimeter-wave Cell Discovery Challenge in 5G Networks with Context-awareness

The introduction of mm-wave technologies in the future 5G networks poses a rich set of network access challenges. We need new ways of dealing with legacy network functionalities to fully unleash their great potential, among them the cell discovery procedure is one of the most critical. In this article, we propose novel cell discovery algorithms enhanced by the context information available through a C-/Uplane- split heterogeneous network architecture. They rely on a geo-located context database to overcome the severe effects of obstacle blockages. Moreover, we investigate the coordination problem of multiple mm-wave base stations that jointly process user access requests. We show that optimizing the resource allocated to the discovery has a great importance in defining perceived latency and supported user request rate. We have performed complete and accurate numerical simulations to provide a clear overview of the main challenging aspects. Results show that the proposed solutions have an outstanding performance with respect to basic discovery approaches and can fully enable mm-wave cell discovery in 5G networks

Passive and Privacy-preserving Human Localization via mmWave Access Points for Social Distancing

The pandemic outbreak has profoundly changed our life, especially our social habits and communication behaviors. While this dramatic shock has heavily impacted human interaction rules, novel localization techniques are emerging to help society in complying with new policies, such as social distancing. Wireless sensing and machine learning are well suited to alleviate viruses propagation in a privacy-preserving manner. However, its wide deployment requires cost-effective installation and operational solutions. In public environments, individual localization information-such as social distancing-needs to be monitored to avoid safety threats when not properly observed. To this end, the high penetration of wireless devices can be exploited to continuously analyze-and-learn the propagation environment, thereby passively detecting breaches and triggering alerts if required. In this paper, we describe a novel passive and privacy-preserving human localization solution that relies on the directive transmission properties of mmWave communications to monitor social distancing and notify people in the area in case of violations. Thus, addressing the social distancing challenge in a privacy-preserving and cost-efficient manner. Our solution provides an overall accuracy of about 99% in the tested scenarios

Diurnal and semidiurnal cyclicity of Radon (222Rn) in groundwater, Giardino Spring, Central Apennines, Italy

Understanding natural variations of Rn (222Rn) concentrations is the fundamental prerequisite of using this radioactive gas as a tracer, or even precursor, of natural processes, including earthquakes. In this work, Rn concentrations in groundwater were continuously measured over a seven-month period, during 2017, in the Giardino Spring, Italy, together with groundwater levels in a nearby well installed into a fractured regional aquifer. Data were processed to reduce noise, and then analyzed to produce the Fourier spectra of Rn concentrations and groundwater levels. These spectra were compared with the spectrum of tidal forces. Results showed that diurnal and semidiurnal cycles of Rn concentrations, and filtered oscillations of groundwater levels, in the nearby well, are correlated with solar and luni-solar components of tidal forces, and suggested no correlation with the principal lunar components. Therefore, influencing factors linked to solar cycles, such as daily oscillations of temperature and atmospheric pressure, and related rock deformations, may have played a role in Rn concentrations and groundwater levels. An open question remains regarding the correlation, which is documented elsewhere, of Rn concentrations and groundwater levels with the lunar components of the solid Earth tides

Analysis of High-Rate GPS Data Collected During the L’Aquila Seismic Sequence

Four days before the 6th April M5.8 L’Aquila main-shock, a few GPS receivers recording at 10Hz and 1Hz sampling rates have been set up by INGV in the area affected by the seismic swarm in place by mid-January 2009. These data allowed us to measure for the first time in Italy the dynamic co-seismic displacements with periods ranging from fractions of seconds to several minutes and the full time spectra of the surface co-seismic and early post-seismic deformation with GPS instruments. We use TRACK, the kinematic module of the GAMIT/GLOBK software package, to perform epoch-by-epoch solutions of GPS raw data to obtain 3D time series of surface displacements. TRACK uses floating point LC (L3) observations between pairs of stations and the Mebourne-Wubena Wide Lane combination, with ionospheric constraints, to determine integer ambiguities at each epoch. It requires a fixed station and one, or more, kinematic stations. Usually, the static station is chosen to be far enough from the epicentral area not to be affected by the co-seismic displacements. Since no automatic processing engine exists for TRACK, we built a new shell script, which take full advantage of the Linux CPU-cluster routinely used to analyze 30 seconds GPS data with the GAMIT at INGV-Bologna. The new tool allows to automatically process pairs of stations (i.e., a network) and getting raw time series of several stations simultaneously (depending on the number of cluster nodes available) in a few seconds or minute, depending on the length of the session analyzed. TRACK uses broadcasted, ultra-rapid (containing predictions), rapid and final IGS orbits, thus making quasi-real time processing possible, and actually limited by the access to remote raw high rate GPS data archives. Since that the only two stations recording 10Hz data in the L’Aquila region are located close to the main shock epicenter and no data were available at other sites in Italy, we built a new tool to generate a virtual far field reference station acquiring 10Hz data by interpolating the available 1Hz RINEX data. The interpolated sites permit to properly solve the epoch-by-epoch position of the epicentral sites with the TRACK module. High frequency GPS data are severely affected by multipath noise, which can reach the same magnitude of the co-seismic displacements, and need to be removed consistently. For this reason, we investigate the effect of time and space-wise filters (sidereal and common mode filters) and set up a Matlab tool to perform time and spatial filtering on the raw time series produced by our processing tool. High rate data allow to measure the real static co-seismic offsets, which are not contaminated by early afterslip, which may occur in the next few hours after the earthquake. We analyze 10Hz data from 2 stations (Fig. 1) belonging to the CAGEONET network (Anzidei et al., 2009), and 1Hz data from 75 continuous GPS stations, located in central, southern and northern Italy, for which data are available for the 6th of April. A data quality inspection of the available high rate rinex files has been used to select the reference station, and single baselines solutions have been then resolved. We apply both spatial (common-mode) and temporal (sideral) filters to improve the signal to noise ratio of the observed displacements and estimate the epoch and the static co-seismic offsets. The 3D co-seismic displacement field has been used to invert, using rectangular (Okada, 1985), uniform-slip dislocations embedded in an elastic, homogeneous and isotropic half-space and a constrained, non-linear optimization algorithm (Burgmann et al., 1997), the best fit rectangular dislocation geometry and fault slip distribution, which has been compared with the fault geometry and slip model obtained from the analysis of standard 30 sec 24 hours data

The study of karstic aquifers by geodetic measurements in Bus de la Genziana station \u2013 Cansiglio Plateau (Northeastern Italy)

We propose an interdisciplinary study of karstic aquifers using titlmeters and GPS observations. The study region is located in northeastern Italy, in the seismic area of the Cansiglio Playeau. The Zollner type Marussi tiltmeters are installed in a natural cavity (Bus del la Genziana) that is part of an interesting karstic area of particular hydrogeologic importance. The Livenza river forms from a number of springs at the foothills of the karstic massif and flows through the Friuli-Veneto plain into the Adriatic Sea. Comparing the tiltmeter signal recorded at the Genziana station with the local pluviometrical series and the hydrometric series of the Livenza river, a clear correlation is recognized. Moreover, the data of a permanent GPS station located on the southern slopes of the Cansiglio Massif (CANV) show also a clear correspondence with the water runoff. Here we present the hydrologic induced deformations as observed by tiltmeter and GPS. After heavy rain events we record rapid deformations both by tiltmeters and GPS corresponding to the rainfall duration. In the following days a slow geodetic motion recovers the accumulated deformation with a distinctive pattern both in tilt and GPS data, which correlates with the runoff of the karstic aquifer. The purpose of this research is to open a new multidisciplinary frontier between geodetic and karstic system studies to improve the knowledge of the underground fluid flow circulation in karstic areas. Furthermore a better characterization of the hydrologic effects on GPS and tilt observations will have the benefit that these signals can be corrected when the focus of the study is to recover the tectonic deformation