A sidecar object for the optimized communication between edge and cloud in internet of things applications

The internet of things (IoT) is one of the most disrupting revolutions that is characterizing the technology ecosystem. In the near future, the IoT will have a significant impact on people's lives and on the design and developments of new paradigms and architectures coping with a completely new set of challenges and service categories. The IoT can be described as an ecosystem where a massive number of constrained devices (denoted as smart objects) will be deployed and connected to cooperate for multiple purposes, such a data collection, actuation, and interaction with people. In order to meet the specific requirements, IoT services may be deployed leveraging a hybrid architecture that will involve services deployed on the edge and the cloud. In this context, one of the challenges is to create an infrastructure of objects and microservices operating between both the edge and in the cloud that can be easily updated and extended with new features and functionalities without the need of updating or re-deploying smart objects. This work introduces a new concept for extending smart objects' support for cloud services, denoted as a sidecar object. A sidecar object serves the purpose of being deployed as additional component of a preexisting object without interfering with the mechanisms and behaviors that have already been implemented. In particular, the sidecar object implementation developed in this work focuses on the communication with existing IoT cloud services (namely, AWS IoT and Google Cloud IoT) to provide a transparent and seamless synchronization of data, states, and commands between the object on the edge and the cloud. The proposed sidecar object implementation has been extensively evaluated through a detailed set of tests, in order to analyze the performances and behaviors in real- world scenarios

Efficient broadcasting in IEEE 802.11 networks through irresponsible forwarding

In a self-organizing vehicular network, vehicles share and distribute information by rebroadcasting a received information packet to their neighbors. An efficient broadcast technique can offer a high reactivity without sacrificing the communication reliability. Therefore, broadcast techniques are particularly suitable for safety-related vehicular transmissions, whose goal is reaching reliably the widest area in the shortest time. Among the numerous solutions appeared in the literature, the probabilistic broadcast approaches seem to be promising and not yet accurately analyzed. Since the interaction between a high level broadcasting protocol with the lower layers cannot be ignored, in this work we analyze the behavior of a recently proposed broadcast technique, denoted as the Irresponsible Forwarding (IF), in IEEE 802.11 networks. Our attention concentrates on the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, which is affected by some critical impairments for broadcasting, such as the hidden terminal problem and self-interference. In this work, we evaluate the benefits brought by the use of IF to perform efficient broadcasting in IEEE 802.11 networks

Cluster-Based Irresponsible Forwarding

"Proc. of the 20th Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications" (Tyrrhenian 2009), Pula, Sardinia, Italy, September 200

Short-lived key management for secure communications in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) are witnessing an ever increasing interest. Security is a key aspect to pave the road to commercial deployments, as malicious attacks may increase the risk of accidents. Key management in VANETs poses further problems, as connectivity is limited and communication with a central certification authority might be problematic. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to key management for securing VANET communications. In particular, a general framework for key group multicast is proposed, with specific application to a VANET communication scenario

Markov chain-based performance analysis of multihop IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a Markov chain-based analytical framework for modeling the behavior of the medium access control (MAC) protocol in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks. Two scenarios are of interest. First, we consider networks where the (sensor) nodes communicate directly to the network coordinator (the final sink). Then, we consider cluster-tree (CT) scenarios where the sources communicate to the coordinator through a series of intermediate relay, which forward the received packets and do not generate traffic on their own. In both scenarios, no acknowledgment messages are used to confirm successful data packet deliveries and communications are beaconed (i.e., they rely on synchronization packets denoted as ``beacons''). In all cases, our focus is on networks where the sources and the relays have finite queues (denoted as buffers) to store data packets. The network performance is evaluated in terms of aggregate network throughput and packet delivery delay. The performance predicted by the proposed analytical framework is in very good agreement with realistic ns-2 simulation results

Markov chain-based performance analysis of multihop IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a Markov chain-based analytical framework for modeling the behavior of the medium access control (MAC) protocol in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks. Two scenarios are of interest. First, we consider networks where the (sensor) nodes communicate directly to the network coordinator (the final sink). Then, we consider cluster-tree (CT) scenarios where the sources communicate to the coordinator through a series of intermediate relay, which forward the received packets and do not generate traffic on their own. In both scenarios, no acknowledgment messages are used to confirm successful data packet deliveries and communications are beaconed (i.e., they rely on synchronization packets denoted as “beacons”). In all cases, our focus is on networks where the sources and the relays have finite queues (denoted as buffers) to store data packets. The network performance is evaluated in terms of aggregate network throughput and packet delivery delay. The performance predicted by the proposed analytical framework is in very good agreement with realistic ns-2 simulation results