Mapping WiFi measurements on OpenStreetMap data for Wireless Street Coverage Analysis

The growing interest on smart cities and the deployment of an ever increasing number of smart objects in public locations, such as dumpsters, traffic lights, and manholes, requires ubiquitous connectivity for these devices to communicate data and to receive configurations. Opportunistic WiFi connectivity is a valid alternative both to ad hoc solutions, like LoRa, which require costly deployments, and to communicating through the mobile network, which is both pricey and battery power hungry. In this paper we present a tool to analyze the WiFi coverage of home Access Points (AP) on the city streets. It can be of interest to ISP or other providers which want to offer connectivity to Internet of Things smart objects deployed around the city. We describe a method for gathering WiFi measures around the city (by leveraging crowdsourcing) and an open source visualization and analysis web application to explore the accumulated data. More importantly, this framework can leverage the semantic information contained in OpenStreetMap data to extract further knowledge about the AP deployment in the city, for example we investigate the relationship between the AP density per square kilometer within the city and the WiFi street coverage ratio

Transparent Bandwidth Aggregation for Residential Access Networks

We propose, implement, and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that allows to improve the upload throughput of the asymmetric digital subscriber line connection by leveraging the unused bandwidth of neighboring users. The residential access gateway adopts the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve the local home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. To evaluate the achievable performance and tune the parameters driving the traffic balancing, we developed a fluid model that was shown experimentally to be very accurate. Our proposed scheme is amenable to efficient implementation on Linux networking stack. Indeed, we implemented it and tested in some realistic scenarios, showing an efficient exploitation of the whole available bandwidth, also for legacy cloud storage applications

Progettare chatbot: considerazioni e linee guida

Il lavoro si propone di delineare una serie di linee guida per la progettazione di chatbot e assistenti virtuali a partire dall’analisi degli attuali trend di progettazione e delle esigenze lato utente rilevate da precedenti lavori di rassegna della letteratura esistente. Il presente lavoro è stato svolto nell’ambito del progetto “Cognitive Solution for Intelligent Caring” di TIM.This work is focused on the current trends in designing chatbots and virtual assistants. We start from users’ needs identified in industrial surveys on chatbots. The result is a collection of guidelines and considerations which reflect the state of the art