Optimal configuration of active and backup servers for augmented reality cooperative games

Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors connected as wireless nodes in an ad-hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad-hoc mode instead of the traditional client-server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of disconnection of the network i.e. due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before incurring in disconnections or energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have hence analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and both numerical and simulation-based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective

Opportunistic Data Gathering and Dissemination in Urban Scenarios

In the era of the Internet of Everything, a user with a handheld or wearable device equipped with sensing capability has become a producer as well as a consumer of information and services. The more powerful these devices get, the more likely it is that they will generate and share content locally, leading to the presence of distributed information sources and the diminishing role of centralized servers. As of current practice, we rely on infrastructure acting as an intermediary, providing access to the data. However, infrastructure-based connectivity might not always be available or the best alternative. Moreover, it is often the case where the data and the processes acting upon them are of local scopus. Answers to a query about a nearby object, an information source, a process, an experience, an ability, etc. could be answered locally without reliance on infrastructure-based platforms. The data might have temporal validity limited to or bounded to a geographical area and/or the social context where the user is immersed in. In this envisioned scenario users could interact locally without the need for a central authority, hence, the claim of an infrastructure-less, provider-less platform. The data is owned by the users and consulted locally as opposed to the current approach of making them available globally and stay on forever. From a technical viewpoint, this network resembles a Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network where consumers and producers might be spatially and temporally decoupled exchanging information with each other in an adhoc fashion. To this end, we propose some novel data gathering and dissemination strategies for use in urban-wide environments which do not rely on strict infrastructure mediation. While preserving the general aspects of our study and without loss of generality, we focus our attention toward practical applicative scenarios which help us capture the characteristics of opportunistic communication networks

Delay Tolerant Networking over the Metropolitan Public Transportation

We discuss MDTN: a delay tolerant application platform built on top of the Public Transportation System (PTS) and able to provide service access while exploiting opportunistic connectivity. Our solution adopts a carrier-based approach where buses act as data collectors for user requests requiring Internet access. Simulations based on real maps and PTS routes with state-of-the-art routing protocols demonstrate that MDTN represents a viable solution for elastic nonreal-time service delivery. Nevertheless, performance indexes of the considered routing policies show that there is no golden rule for optimal performance and a tailored routing strategy is required for each specific case

KuberneTSN: a Deterministic Overlay Network for Time-Sensitive Containerized Environments

The emerging paradigm of resource disaggregation enables the deployment of cloud-like services across a pool of physical and virtualized resources, interconnected using a network fabric. This design embodies several benefits in terms of resource efficiency and cost-effectiveness, service elasticity and adaptability, etc. Application domains benefiting from such a trend include cyber-physical systems (CPS), tactile internet, 5G networks and beyond, or mixed reality applications, all generally embodying heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this context, a key enabling factor to fully support those mixed-criticality scenarios will be the network and the system-level support for time-sensitive communication. Although a lot of work has been conducted on devising efficient orchestration and CPU scheduling strategies, the networking aspects of performance-critical components remain largely unstudied. Bridging this gap, we propose KuberneTSN, an original solution built on the Kubernetes platform, providing support for time-sensitive traffic to unmodified application binaries. We define an architecture for an accelerated and deterministic overlay network, which includes kernel-bypassing networking features as well as a novel userspace packet scheduler compliant with the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard. The solution is implemented as tsn-cni, a Kubernetes network plugin that can coexist alongside popular alternatives. To assess the validity of the approach, we conduct an experimental analysis on a real distributed testbed, demonstrating that KuberneTSN enables applications to easily meet deterministic deadlines, provides the same guarantees of bare-metal deployments, and outperforms overlay networks built using the Flannel plugin.Comment: 6 page

Would Current Ad Hoc Routing Protocols be Adequate for the Internet of Vehicles? A Comparative Study

In recent years we have seen a great proliferation of smart vehicles, ranging from cars to little drones (both terrestrial and aerial), all endowed with sensors and communication capabilities. It is hence easy to foresee a future with even more smart and connected vehicles moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this IoV, a multitude of nodes (both static and mobile) will generate a continuous multihop flow of local information to support local smart environment applications. Therefore, one interesting environment for the IoV would be in the form of 3-D mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Unfortunately, MANET routing protocols have generally been designed and analyzed keeping in mind a 2-D scenario; there is no guarantee on how they would support a 3-D topology of the IoV. To this end, we have considered routing protocols deemed as the state-of-the-art for classic MANETs and tested them over 3-D topologies to evaluate their assets and technical challenges

Editorial: Smart Objects and Technologies

Smart objects are entering everyday life and are heavily modifying it. Healthcare, communication, art, entertainment, safety, environment, education, democracy, and human rights, are just a few examples of scenarios that are radically changing thanks to the use of smart objects and technologies. In this context, the popularity of portable computing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, or smart watches combined with the emergence of many other small smart objects with computational, sensing and communication capabilities coupled with the popularity of social networks and new human-technology interaction paradigms is creating unprecedented opportunities for each of us to do something useful, ranging from a single person to the whole world. Furthermore, Internet of Things, Smart-cities, distributed sensing and Fog computing are representative examples of modern ICT paradigms that aim to describe a dynamic and globally cooperative infrastructure built upon objects intelligence and self-configuring capabilities. These connected objects are finding their way into our pockets, vehicles, urban areas and infrastructure, thus becoming the very texture of our society and providing us the possibility, but also the responsibility, to shape it

A Novel Design for Advanced 5G Deployment Environments with Virtualized Resources at Vehicular and MEC Nodes

IoT and edge computing are profoundly changing the information era, bringing a hyper-connected and context-aware computing environment to reality. Connected vehicles are a critical outcome of this synergy, allowing for the seamless interconnection of autonomous mobile/fixed objects, giving rise to a decentralized vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigm. On this front, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) proposed the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) standard, addressing the execution of cloud-like services at the very edge of the infrastructure, thus facilitating the support of low-latency services at the far-edge. In this article, we go a step further and propose a novel ETSI MEC-compliant architecture that fully exploits the synergies between the edge and far-edge, extending the pool of virtualized resources available at MEC nodes with vehicular ones found in the vicinity. In particular, our approach allows vehicle entities to access and partake in a negotiation process embodying a rewarding scheme, while addressing resource volatility as vehicles join and leave the resource pool. To demonstrate the viability and flexibility of our proposed approach, we have built an ETSI MEC-compliant simulation model, which could be tailored to distribute application requests based on the availability of both local and remote resources, managing their transparent migration and execution. In addition, the paper reports on the experimental validation of our proposal in a 5G network setting, contrasting different service delivery modes, by highlighting the potential of the dynamic exploitation of far-edge vehicular resources

Measuring the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on mobility: A real case study from Italy

When COVID-19 first struck the provinces of Northern Italy in early 2020 (especially in Lombardy and in EmiliaRomagna), the conditions there made it a perfect storm. The virus outbreak spread with an unusual violence (in the period from late February to April 2020), with a catastrophic toll in terms of human deaths. Taken by surprise, Italy mandated a complete nation-wide lockdown, successively resorting to ministerial decrees alleviating and postponing the restrictions. Now more than ever, there is an increased awareness on ICT used to combat the pandemic. In this article, we present a quantitative analysis evidencing the impact of restrictions on mobility. To this end, we rely on a vehicular mobility dataset confined in the downtown area of Bologna, Italy. Pursuing the objective, we propose a modified version of a state-of-theart data mining algorithm, allowing us to efficiently identify and quantify mobility flows. The proposal, if combined with additional data sources, could allow for a fine-grained and timely decision making, combating the pandemic

Performance evaluation of AQM techniques with heterogeneous traffic

Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques have been proposed to support scenarios with many connections sharing the same bottleneck. The basic idea is that a smart management of the bottleneck queue can avoid the saturation of the link and ensure a smoother use of the available bandwidth. This is generally achieved by exploiting the flux control mechanism of TCP and its behavior in case of packet losses or other explicit notifications. In this paper we consider classic and innovative AQM techniques and analyse their performance under different scenarios through the use of mean field models