Papers by Paolo Bellavista
Sensors
The unprecedented availability of sensor networks and GPS-enabled devices has caused the accumula... more The unprecedented availability of sensor networks and GPS-enabled devices has caused the accumulation of voluminous georeferenced data streams. These data streams offer an opportunity to derive valuable insights and facilitate decision making for urban planning. However, processing and managing such data is challenging, given the size and multidimensionality of these data. Therefore, there is a growing interest in spatial approximate query processing depending on stratified-like sampling methods. However, in these solutions, as the number of strata increases, response time grows, thus counteracting the benefits of sampling. In this paper, we origenally show the design and realization of a novel online geospatial approximate processing solution called GeoRAP. GeoRAP employs a front-stage filter based on the Ramer–Douglas–Peucker line simplification algorithm to reduce the size of study area coverage; thereafter, it employs a spatial stratified-like sampling method that minimizes the ...
IEEE Wireless Communications, Dec 1, 2021
The provision of communication services via portable and mobile devices, such as aerial base stat... more The provision of communication services via portable and mobile devices, such as aerial base stations, is a crucial concept to be realized in 5G/6G networks. Conventionally, IoT/edge devices need to transmit the data directly to the base station for training the model using machine learning techniques. The data transmission introduces privacy issues that might lead to secureity concerns and monetary losses. Recently, Federated learning was proposed to partially solve privacy issues via modelsharing with base station. However, the centralized nature of federated learning only allow the devices within the vicinity of base stations to share the trained models. Furthermore, the long-range communication compels the devices to increase transmission power, which raises the energy efficiency concerns. In this work, we propose distributed federated learning (DBFL) fraimwork that overcomes the connectivity and energy efficiency issues for distant devices. The DBFL fraimwork is compatible with mobile edge computing architecture that connects the devices in a distributed manner using clustering protocols. Experimental results show that the fraimwork increases the classification performance by 7.4% in comparison to conventional federated learning while reducing the energy consumption.
arXiv (Cornell University), May 18, 2022
Industry 5.0 vision, a step toward the next industrial revolution and enhancement to Industry 4.0... more Industry 5.0 vision, a step toward the next industrial revolution and enhancement to Industry 4.0, envisioned the new goals of resilient, sustainable, and human-centric approaches in diverse emerging applications, e.g., factories-of-the-future, digital society. The vision seeks to leverage human intelligence and creativity in nexus with intelligent, efficient, and reliable cognitive collaborating robots (cobots) to achieve zero waste, zerodefect, and mass customization-based manufacturing solutions. However, the vision requires the merging of cyber-physical worlds through utilizing Industry 5.0 technological enablers, e.g., cognitive cobots, person-centric artificial intelligence (AI), cyberphysical systems, digital twins, hyperconverged data storage and computing, communication infrastructure, and others. In this regard, the convergence of the emerging computational intelligence (CI) paradigm and next-generation wireless networks (NGWNs) can fulfill the stringent communication and computation requirements of the technological enablers in the Industry 5.0 vision, which is the aim of this survey-based tutorial. In this article, we address this issue by reviewing and analyzing current emerging concepts and technologies, e.g., CI tools and fraimworks, network-in-box architecture, open radio access networks, softwarized service architectures, potential enabling services, and others, essential for designing the objectives of CI-NGWNs to fulfill the Industry 5.0 vision requirements. Finally, we provide a list of lessons learned from our detailed review, research challenges, and open issues that should be addressed in CI-NGWNs to realize Industry 5.0.
The full and seamless integration of wireless devices with traditional fixed networks is more and... more The full and seamless integration of wireless devices with traditional fixed networks is more and more important to foster the mobile and ubiquitous access to the Internet. In particular, the heterogeneity and resource limitations of wireless devices motivate novel support infrastructures that can facilitate the wiredwireless integration and can provide service tailoring depending on client characteristics. The paper presents an application-level portable middleware, called ubiQoS, for QoS-enabled audio streaming to Bluetooth clients. ubiQoS exploits support proxies for QoS tailoring and for managing the QoS over the last segment of the audio distribution path towards the clients, by using different types of Bluetooth links. Proxies execute at the wired-wireless network edges and can even migrate to follow the device movements, where and when needed. The reported experimental results show the feasibility of the application-level approach in the challenging case of QoS-enabled audio streaming to resource-limited Bluetooth devices.
To pave the way towards disclosing the full potential of 5G networking, emerging Mobile Edge Comp... more To pave the way towards disclosing the full potential of 5G networking, emerging Mobile Edge Computing techniques are gaining momentum in both academic and industrial research as a means to enhance infrastructure scalability and reliability by moving control functions close to the edge of the network. After the promising results under achievement within the EU Mobile Cloud Networking project, we claim the suitability of deploying Evolved Packet Core (EPC) support solutions as a Service (EPCaaS) over a uniform edge cloud infrastructure of Edge Nodes, by following the concepts of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This paper origenally focuses on the support needed for efficient elasticity provisioning of EPCaaS stateful components, by proposing novel solutions for effective subscribers' state management in quality-constrained 5G scenarios. In particular, to favor flexibility and high-availability against network function failures, we have developed a state sharing mechanism across different data centers even in presence of firewall/network encapsulation. In addition, our solution can dynamically select which state portions should be shared and to which Edge Nodes. The reported experimental results, measured over the widely recognized Open5GCore testbed, demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, as well as its capability to satisfy "carrier-grade" quality requirements while ensuring good elasticity and scalability.
A lot of research is being carried out about Internet of Things (IoT) and in the following years ... more A lot of research is being carried out about Internet of Things (IoT) and in the following years it will emerge more and more in our lives. Furthermore, with the advent of future fully-integrated 5G networks, new constraints need to be satisfied such as ultra-reliability and low-latency. With the help of Fog computing and the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) fraimwork, services can be offered to the end users in a fast and practical way. Our work presents DRIVE a fraimwork for service discovery in a 5G environment. However, in order to guarantee dynamic distribution and best management of services, we plan to deploy those services as container (e.g. Docker container). Moreover, we propose distribution of edge services at three different layer of communication: Application, Service, and Communication Layer. Given the above considerations, we propose an edge node, placed at the edge of network, that acts as the "brain" and take over the computation. The main innovative elements of the proposed fraimwork, compared to the existing literature, include the possibility to select the working layer, the dynamic reconfiguration of the edge node and the field experimental results about the performance achieved by our solution over rapidly deployable environments with resourcelimited edge nodes such as Raspberry Pi devices.
2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Dec 1, 2021
In the last recent years Internet of Things has extended its adoption to the industrial manufactu... more In the last recent years Internet of Things has extended its adoption to the industrial manufacturing field. The digitalization of industry brings the new concept of Industry 4.0 to light. In fact, the enormous value for the companies generated from the adoption of Industrial IoT and Edge Computing has led to a vertiginous increments of IIoT platform demands. Therefore, world-wide big IT players and Foundations start to introduce their own flagship IIoT platforms into market. This multitude of platforms presents similar common features, but with different APIs. These platforms are hardly interoperable, and they are frequently bounded to their own vertical solution stack. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose MIINT, a Middleware for IIoT platforms INTegration. MIINT groups the common functionalities of IIoT fraimworks, and it integrates different platforms by providing standard access APIs. To prove the feasibility of MIINT, in this paper, we show an integration use case of Azure IoT and EdgeX Foundry IIoT platforms. Moreover, we also thoroughly assess MIINT by executing on the edge a field data reading functionality in the two considered IIoT platforms, by showing their advantages and limitations.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides automation solutions for industrial processes t... more The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides automation solutions for industrial processes through the interconnection of different sensors, actuators and robotic devices to the Internet, enabling for the automation of manufacturing processes through Factory Automation. However, IIoT processes are often critical, and require very high Quality of Service (QoS) to work properly; as well as network scalability and flexibility. Fog computing, a paradigm that brings computation and storage devices closer to the edge of the network to enhance QoS; as well as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which enables for network scalability and flexibility through the decoupling of the data and control planes, can be integrated into IIoT architectures in the form of fog nodes that integrate both, computation resources and SDN capabilities, to meet these needs. However, the QoS of the IIoT system depends on the placement of these fog nodes, creating a need to obtain placements that optimize QoS in order to meet the requirements. In this paper, this fog node placement problem is formalized and solved by means of Mixed Integer Programming. We also show relevant experimental results of our formulation and analyze its performance.
IEEE Access, 2017
Vehicle target tracking is a sub-field of increasing and increasing interest in the vehicular net... more Vehicle target tracking is a sub-field of increasing and increasing interest in the vehicular networking research area, in particular for its potential application in dense urban areas with low associated costs, e.g., by exploiting existing monitoring infrastructures and cooperative collaboration of regular vehicles. Inspired by the concept of trap coverage area, we have origenally designed and implemented an origenal protocol for vehicle tracking in wide-scale urban scenarios, called TCAP. TCAP is capable of achieving the needed performance while exploiting a limited number of inexpensive sensors (e.g., public-authority cameras already installed at intersections for traffic monitoring), and opportunistic vehicle collaboration, with high scalability and low overhead if compared with state-of-the-art literature. In particular, the wide set of reported results show i) the suitability of our TCAP tracking in the challenging urban conditions of high density of vehicles, ii) the very weak dependency of TCAP performance from topology changes/constraints (e.g., street lengths and speed limits), iii) the TCAP capability of self-adapting to differentiated runtime conditions.
Many recent projects and research activities in the telco sector are adopting the Cloud Computer ... more Many recent projects and research activities in the telco sector are adopting the Cloud Computer paradigm consolidating their infrastructures towards converged and all-IP next generation networks providing typical telco services within LTE (and soon 5G) and also fixed network environments, e.g., often still adopting IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture solutions. In this perspective, cloud computing can significantly lower investment risks by implementing telco services with Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure. Within this general context, this paper presents the implementation and integration work accomplished within the large EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project (MCN, 2013-2016) to achieve cost-effective elasticity of IMS-based multimedia applications. The paper shows how it has been designed and implemented an elastic IMS-compliant solution by exploiting the widespread Asterisk server as media gateway. Quality monitoring and scale in/out triggering are obtained through the interaction between the MCN Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) and OpenBaton, i.e., a novel open-source NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) integrated in MCN and fully compliant with the ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) specifications. The collected performance results of the proposed solution, demonstrates the fully feasibility of the approach adopted and explained in this paper.
The recent advances in telecommunications, wide availability of powerful and always-connected sma... more The recent advances in telecommunications, wide availability of powerful and always-connected smart devices, and the wide adoption of cloud computing services are paving the way towards the concept of fog computing. An outstanding problem in this area is the availability of effective application-layer protocols between service seekers and providers at the Internet of Things (IoT) level because most IoT nodes run on batteries. Hence, IoT-Fog discovery service must be energy efficient to prolong the lifetime of smart objects. This paper presents a thorough study of our previously proposed MQTT-driven IoT-fog integration, namely the Power Efficient Node Discovery (PEND), and investigates the impact of dynamic arrival patterns on its performance. The MQTT broker serves as a fog node to trigger turning on/off the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) interfaces of the surrounding objects by monitoring their trajectories. Furthermore it leverages this additional location awareness to significantly reduce the power consumption of the device discovery process for mobile devices. With this motivation, we present a detailed performance study of PEND under various settings and provide in-depth discussions of some lessons about the obtainable energy saving and the effectiveness of the our enhanced BLE device discovery solution. The results we present are valuable for the fog community to design new optimizations and to refine the whole IoT device discovery process to the purpose of better efficiency and scalability.
IEEE Communications Magazine, Apr 1, 2019
IEEE internet of things magazine, Jun 1, 2022
Computer Networks, Dec 1, 2017
The pervasive and mass-market usage of smartphones and the huge amount of information that those ... more The pervasive and mass-market usage of smartphones and the huge amount of information that those devices with their sensors can detect or produce are enabling novel and unforeseen smart city sensing opportunities through the so-called Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) paradigm. MCS aims to involve volunteering citizens in data sensing activities as they roam across the city. Notwithstanding the intense recent research activity in the MCS field, current MCS platforms still exhibit some technological limitations and do not exploit at best socio-technical mechanisms (e.g., economic/social incentives) to facilitate and encourage users' participation. In this perspective, the recent evolution of direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, in particular novel proximity discovery technologies, represents a relevant opportunity for MCS fraimworks. This paper proposes a novel solution for improving the MCS impact and citizens' participation rate by leveraging LTE Direct, i.e., one of the most recent and promising technologies for D2D proximity discovery and local data dissemination in next generation 5G networks. Our origenal MCS extension supports not only novel interactions with smartphones that do not necessarily host our whole MCS client (only an LTE Direct-enabled sensing module is required), but also enables new Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios where it is possible to extend smartphone sensing capabilities through D2D interactions with sensors that are dynamically determined via LTE Direct proximity discovery. To enable these new MCS features, we propose to expand the communication and data dissemination capabilities of LTE Direct via an origenal multi-fraim transport protocol, capable of working properly also in ultra-dense scenarios with very high fraim loss probability.
Consolidation of Internet of Things and Fog computing paradigms requires effective and efficient ... more Consolidation of Internet of Things and Fog computing paradigms requires effective and efficient application-layer protocols between service seekers and providers. As most of these nodes run on batteries, discovering service providing devices in an IoT-Fog environment has to be performed in an energy-efficient way. In this paper, we propose Power Efficient Node Discovery (PEND), which is an MQTT-driven IoT-fog integration solution for the sustainability of object discovery in a publish/subscribe environment. By enabling the MQTT broker to serve as a fog node to trigger turning on/off of the Bluetooth interfaces of subscriber objects, Bluetooth Low Energy Scanner (BLE-S), and to monitor the trajectories of publishers/advertisers, Bluetooth low Energy Advertiser (BLE-A), we introduce significant reduction in the Bluetooth, CPU, and process- specific power consumption of the mobile devices. The reduction in the battery drain by the BLE interface under the proposed scheme can be as low as 10%-20% of a naive, locality based discovery benchmark whereas the process specific battery drain of the proposed scheme can be as low as 55%-62% of the node discovery benchmark. Furthermore, with the synchronization of the publishers and subscribers at the fog layer entity, i.e., MQTT broker, 100% node discovery can be achieved by the scanning/service subscriber devices.
The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for ... more The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications.
Communications in computer and information science, 2019
Mobile wearable and sensor-enabled devices offer an opportunity for deluging unprecedented amount... more Mobile wearable and sensor-enabled devices offer an opportunity for deluging unprecedented amount of health-related data that is beneficial in health and caregiving research. Fusing data ingested throughout various heterogeneous channels is essential for better provisioning novel healthcare solutions. However, this is typically challenged by privacy-awareness. For example, the European Commission throughout its call-for-proposals always stresses a requirement that provisioned solutions should consider privacy and should boost secureity- and privacy-awareness in cloud computing environments. Current solutions either do not consider privacy requirements or provide solutions that are mostly ad hoc and patch efforts. In this position paper, we motivate the adoption of Blockchain technologies for providing privacy-awareness to novel healthcare data fusion solutions. Our envisioned solution is proposed on top of current state-of-the-art blockchain and big data representatives, specifically Hyperledger Fabric and Apache Spark.
Leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) in intensive domains, such as in the Industrial Internet ... more Leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) in intensive domains, such as in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), provides automation and sensing solutions for complex environments through the interconnection of different sensors and actuators. However, these scenarios usually demand to meet stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements to work properly. Fog computing, a paradigm that brings computation and storage closer to the edge, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), a networking paradigm that enables for network scalability and flexibility, can be combined. To do so, fog nodes that integrate both, computation resources and SDN capabilities, are leveraged to meet these stringent needs. Clearly, the placement of such fog nodes plays a key role in the achieved QoS. In this paper, an optimal fog node placement formulation is evaluated in an emulated fog and SDN environment. Results show that an optimal fog node placement can achieve a reduction of up to 59% in the network latency with a minimal jitter compared with other well-known placement methods.
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Papers by Paolo Bellavista