A privacy-friendly gaming framework in smart electricity and water grids

Serious games can be used to push consumers of common-pool resources toward socially responsible consumption patterns. However, gamified interactions can result in privacy leaks and potential misuses of player-provided data. In the Smart Grid ecosystem, a smart metering framework providing some basic cryptographic primitives can enable the implementation of serious games in a privacy-friendly manner. This paper presents a smart metering architecture in which the users have access to their own high-frequency data and can use them as the input data to a multi-party secure protocol. Authenticity and correctness of the data are guaranteed by the usage of a public blockchain. The framework enables a gaming platform to administer a set of team game activities aimed at promoting a more sustainable usage of energy and water. We discuss and assess the performance of a protocol based on Shamir secret sharing scheme, which enables the members of the teams to calculate their overall consumption and to compare it with those of other teams without disclosing individual energy usage data. Additionally, the protocol impedes that the game platform learns the meter readings of the players (either individual or aggregated) and their challenge objectives

Complexity Analysis of Optimal Recharge Scheduling for Electric Vehicles

IEEE early access articleInternational audienceThe massive introduction of Electric Vehicles (EVs) will make fleet managers spend a significant amount of money to buy electric energy. If energy price changes over time, accurate scheduling of recharging times may result in significant savings. In this paper we evaluate the complexity of the optimal scheduling problem considering a scenario with a fleet manager having full knowledge of the customers’ traveling needs at the beginning of the scheduling horizon. We prove that the problem has polynomial complexity and provide complexity lower and upperbounds. Moreover, we propose an online sub-optimal scheduling heuristic that schedules the EVs’ recharge based on historical travelling data. We compare the performance of the optimal and sub-optimal methods to a benchmark online approach that does not rely on any prior knowledge of the customers’ requests, in order to evaluate whether the additional complexity required by the proposed strategies is worth the achieved economicadvantages. Numerical results show up to of 35% cost savings with respect to the benchmark approach

Evaluating the effects of social interactions on a distributed demand side management system for domestic appliances

In the presence of time-variable energy tariffs, users will try to schedule the usage of their electrical appliances with the goal of minimising their bill. If the variable price component depends on the peak aggregate demand during each given hour, users will be incentivised to redistribute their consumption during the day, thus lowering the overall peak consumption. The process can be automated by means of an Energy Management System that chooses the best schedule while satisfying the user's constraints on the maximum tolerable delays. In turn, users' thresholds on delay tolerance may slowly change over time. In fact, users may be willing to modify their threshold to match the threshold of their social group, especially if there is evidence that friends with a more flexible approach have paid a lower bill. We provide an algorithmic framework that models the effect of social interactions in a distributed demand side management system and show that such interactions can increase the flexibility of users' schedules and lower the peak power, resulting in a smoother usage of energy throughout the day. Additionally, we provide an alternative description of the model by using Markov Chains and study the corresponding convergence times. We conclude that the users reach a steady state after a limited number of interactions

Differentially private queries in crowdsourced databases for net neutrality violations detection

Lawmakers and regulatory bodies around the world are asserting Network Neutrality as a fundamental property of broadband Internet access. Since neutrality implies a comparison between different users and different ISPs, this opens the question of how to measure net neutrality in a privacy-friendly manner. This work describes a system in which users convey throughput measurements for the different services they use to a crowd-sourced database and submit queries testing their measurements against the hypothesis of a neutral network. The usage of crowd sourced databases poses potential privacy problems, because users submit data that may possibly disclose information about their own habits. This leaves the door open to information leakages regarding the content of the measurement database. Randomized sampling and suppression of small clusters can provide a good tradeoff between usefulness of the system, in terms of precision and recall of discriminated users, and privacy, in terms of differential privacy

Metodo per il recupero in tempo reale degli errori di trasmissione di segnali audio in formato MIDI

Viene presentato un metodo per le cosiddette ‘Network Music Performance’ per scambiare dati MIDI e.g. di uno strumento musicale, comprendente la fase di includere nei dati, i.e. in un pacchetto di refresh, ad intervalli di tempo successivi, una lista di valori definente uno stato del detto strumento musicale in istanti di tempo successivi e progressivi rappresentativo dell’azione di un musicista sullo strumento nei rispettivi detti istanti di tempo

A survey on the design of gamified systems for energy and water sustainability

Abstract In a world affected by the constant growth and concentration of the population in urban areas, the problem of preserving natural resources has become a priority. A promising approach to resource conservation is demand management, i.e., the ability to positively influence the behaviour of the population towards more sustainable consumption. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools have shown a great potential in influencing consumers’ behaviour, which could be exploited for the common good. However, the design of so-called persuasive systems for environmental purposes is a challenging task, because it cannot be based solely on the utilitarian motivation of users, but must be able to trigger a broader range of engagement factors deeply rooted in the human psychology. In this paper, we review the main design principles and models at the base of a class of persuasive system that exploits gamification and Games with a Purpose (GWAPs) to engage users towards sustainability; we identify the most commonly used incentive mechanisms for inducing behavioural changes; and present a selection of gamified systems for energy and water conservation. From such a survey, we distill design guidelines to be applied in the design of demand management socio-technical systems

Routing and spectrum assignment in metro optical ring networks with distance-adaptive transceivers

In this paper we overview our research activities on the Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA) in optical metro ring networks with flexible grid and distance-adaptive transceivers. We consolidate our existing mathematical models of the RSA problem in a single comprehensive formulation that can work under very diverse assumptions (variable-vs. fixed-spectrum transceivers, regeneration vs. no regeneration, grooming vs. no grooming, etc.). We discuss the complexity of the various versions of the RSA problem and summarize the main numerical results obtained in our previous works. A final section is dedicated to an overview of possible extensions of this work in the context of Space Division Multiplexing

Routing, Modulation Format, Baud Rate and Spectrum Allocation in Optical Metro Rings with Flexible Grid and Few-Mode Transmission

Application of few-mode transmission (FMT) in transport optical network is currently under scrutiny, especially for metro networks, where shorter distances and pressing traffic increase (e.g., due to a growing need for metro datacenter interconnection) represent promising conditions for FMT deployment. In this paper, we analyze, from a network-level perspective, the benefits introduced by FMT in metro networks. We consider the application in a flexi-grid network of a FMT system employing hybrid optical/digital mode demultiplexer and low-complexity MIMO-based digital signal processing (DSP). Under this system model, we derive the reach values associated to different modulation formats, baud rates, and number of modes. For the first time to the best of our knowledge, we formulate using linear programming the routing, modulation format, baud rate, and mode assignment problem, for two different switching policies (spatially flexible and spatially and spectrally flexible switching). Using our proposed modes, we identify the configurations that ensure minimum spectrum occupation or minimum cost of installed transceivers, and contrast them to the benchmark case of single-mode transmission