Alberto Gotta

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Information Science and Technology "Alessandro Faedo" ISTI

Emotion recognition has attracted a lot of interest in recent years in various application areas such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Existing approaches to emotion recognition are based on visual, speech, or psychophysiological signals. However, recent studies are looking at multimodal techniques that combine different modalities for emotion...

A distributed decision support system has been developed to assist seafarers during several navigation tasks, for instance, in avoiding a collision with a detected obstacle in the sea and envisioning a future autonomous navigation system. In this paper, the decision support system is based on the results of a customized simulation model representin...

The paper proposes a data-driven approach to air-to-ground channel estimation in a millimeter-wave wireless network on an unmanned aerial vehicle. Unlike traditional centralized learning methods that are specific to certain geographical areas and inappropriate for others, we propose a generalized model that uses Federated Learning (FL) for channel...

With the advent of 5G and the anticipated arrival of 6G, there has been a growing research interest in combining mobile networks with Non-Terrestrial Network platforms such as low earth orbit satellites and Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit satellites to provide broader coverage for a wide range of applications. However, integrating these platforms i...

In non-terrestrial networks, where low Earth orbit satellites and user equipment move relative to each other, line-of-sight tracking and adapting to channel state variations due to endpoint movements are a major challenge. Therefore, continuous line-of-sight estimation and channel impairment compensation are crucial for user equipment to access a s...

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) mobile networks require integration between terrestrial mobile networks and non-terrestrial networks (NTN) such as satellites and high altitude platforms (HAPs) to ensure wide and ubiquitous coverage, high connection density, reliable communications and high data rates. The main challenge in this integration is th...

The fifth generation (5G) Wireless Communication systems development has brought out a paradigm shift using advanced technologies e.g., softwarization, virtualization, Massive MIMO, ultra-densification and introduction of new frequency bands. However, as the societal needs grow, and to satisfy UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 6G and beyon...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) generate a massive amount of multi-modal data that once collected and processed through Machine Learning algorithms, enable AI-based services at the Edge. In fact, only a subset of the collected data present informative attributes to be exploited at the Edge. Therefore, extracting such a subset is of utmost importance to l...

In recent years, multipath techniques have been increasingly used in multimedia transmission because they offer desirable features such as higher throughput and greater reliability. In this work, we focus on the challenging scenario of real-time video streaming from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a fixed ground control station over multiple wi...

Automatic traffic classification is increasingly important in networking due to the current trend of encrypting transport information (e.g., behind HTTP encrypted tunnels) which prevents intermediate nodes to access end-to-end transport headers. This paper proposes an architecture for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in hybrid terrestrial and SA...

In the shipping digitalisation process, the peak will be reached with the advent of a wholly autonomous and at the same time safe and reliable ship. Full autonomy could be obtained by two linked Artificial-Intelligence systems representing the ship navigator and the ship engineer that possess sensing and analysis skills, situational awareness, plan...

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is attracting a lot of interest because it complements cloud-based approaches. Indeed, MEC is opening up in the direction of reducing both interaction delays and data sharing, called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). In the near fu- ture, edge technologies will be a fundamental tool to better support time-dependent an...

This work presents an innovative, multidisciplinary and cost-effective ecosystem of ICT solutions able to collect, process and distribute geo-referenced information about the influence of pollution and micro-climatic conditions on the quality of life in Smart Cities. The system has been developed and experimentally evaluated in the framework of the...

Automatic traffic classification is increasingly becoming important in traffic engineering, as the current trend of encrypting transport information (e.g., behind HTTP-encrypted tunnels) prevents intermediate nodes from accessing end-to-end packet headers. However, this information is crucial for traffic shaping, network slicing, and Quality of Ser...

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently found wide applications in network traffic management and control because some of its variants do not require prior knowledge of network models. In this paper, we present a novel scheduler for real-time multimedia delivery in multipath systems based on an Actor-Critic (AC) RL algorithm. We focus on a challen...

Mega-LEO satellite constellations are becoming a concrete reality. Companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and OneWeb have already started launching hundreds of LEO satellites and are turning their services on. Even if the aim of such LEO satellite constellations is just, for now, to offer worldwide Internet access equality, their deployment proves...

This paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation of the AI-as-a-service toolkit developed within the H2020 TEACHING project and designed to implement an autonomous driving personalization system according to the output of an automatic driver's stress recognition algorithm, both of them realizing a Cyber-Physical System of Systems. In addition,...

In this work, we focus our attention on real-time multimedia flows from Unmanned Aerial Vehicless (UAV) to the ground, presenting and analysing the data collected in field trials during a real testbed. The objective is assessing whether a video feed of reasonable quality can be provided to the pilot of an UAV to enable Beyond Visual Line of Sight (...

In the shipping digitalisation process, the peak will be reached with the advent of a wholly autonomous and at the same time safe and reliable ship. Full autonomy could be obtained by two linked Artificial-Intelligence systems representing the ship navigator and the ship engineer that possess sensing and analysis skills, situational awareness, plan...

Autonomous systems generate a huge amount of multimodal data that are collected and processed on the Edge, in order to enable AI-based services. The collected datasets are pre-processed in order to extract informative attributes, called features, which are used to feed AI algorithms. Due to the limited computational and communication resources of s...

This paper discusses the perspective of the H2020 TEACHING project on the next generation of autonomous applications running in a distributed and highly heterogeneous environment comprising both virtual and physical resources spanning the edge-cloud continuum. TEACHING puts forward a human-centred vision leveraging the physiological, emotional, and...

The agricultural sector is experiencing a new revolution, giving birth to the so‐called Agriculture 4.0 paradigm. It brings digital technologies in the field to support the farmers' work, enhancing the productivity of farms. In this chapter, attention is focused on the role that both Internet of things (IoT) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) can p...

The massive amount of data collected in the Internet of Things (IoT) asks for effective, intelligent analytics. A recent trend supporting the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in IoT domains is to move the computation closer to the data, i.e., from cloud-based services to edge devices. Federated learning (FL) is the primary approach ado...

This work presents the ongoing development of a simu-lation/emulation framework for real-time multimedia transmissions in multi-channel scenarios. The proposed software engine can be used to simulate the aggregation of multiple network links delivering a video flow from a video source, such as a camera mounted on-board an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (U...

As the Internet of Things (IoT)/Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market is rapidly growing, a special role is expected to be played by satellite communications in that they offer ubiquitous coverage and therefore enable typical monitoring, telemetry, and control services also in areas with a poor terrestrial infrastructure. In this respect, the case of mas...

The historical buildings of a nation are the tangible signs of its history and culture. Their preservation deserves considerable attention, being of primary importance from a historical, cultural, and economic point of view. Having a scalable and reliable monitoring system plays an important role in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM): therefore...

The impulse towards a larger introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the agricultural field is currently experiencing its momentum, as digitisation has large potentialities to provide benefits for both producers and consumers; on the other hand, pushing technological solutions into a rural context encounters several challe...

The rate of traffic generated by MTC is growing at a very fast pace, putting strong pressure on existing network infrastructures. One of the most challenging tasks today is being able to support M2M/IoT data exchanges by providing connectivity between any pair of M2M devices all over the world. For this reason, we analyze the role of SINs in suppor...

Synopsis This paper presents the design framework, in which a Decision Support System (DSS) tool has been developed to assist the bridge operator during a challenging navigation condition. The present project would be another step for using state of the art, IT devices and hardware, to increase safety at sea mainly focusing on both collision and gr...

Provisioning of IoT/M2M services over satellite has been experiencing a continuous growth in the last years, which is expected to further increase in the near future so as to meet the demands of users and enterprises. The design of a suitable network architecture is, hence, of paramount importance to properly take into account the requirements impo...

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is rising in several application fields. This work deals with the communication challenges in UAV swarms, or flying ad hoc network (FANET), when taking into account non–line‐of‐sight scenarios. The use of satellites is a necessity in such operating conditions; thus, this work provides architectural conside...

Smart farming is one of the most promising applications showing the benefits of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Thus, precision agriculture in rural areas may largely benefit from low-cost and easy-to-deploy vehicles able to exchange data with ground sensors for monitoring and controlling automated cultivations. In this letter, we describe,...

Nowadays, Machine-to-Machine and Internet of Things traffic sources puts the terrestrial networks under great pressure. While 5G is still on its way, satellites are used to deliver a fraction of such an enormous traffic rate. In this work, we investigate the use of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to reliably deliver Machine-to-Machine a...

Agriculture is taking advantage of the Internet of Things paradigm and of the use of autonomous vehicles. The 21st century farm will be run by interconnected vehicles: an enormous potential can be provided by the integration of different technologies to achieve automated operations requiring minimum supervision. This work surveys the most relevant...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are attracting an increasing interest from both the industrial and the research fields, because of the large number of scenarios and applications that they can support. One of the big challenges of the next future is the use of UAV swarms, in order to exploit the advantages that coordinated actions of multiple drones...

The use of unmanned aerial systems is increasingly common in both research and industrial fields. Nowadays, the use of single unmanned aerial vehicles is quite established and several products are already available to consumers, while swarms are still subject of research and development. This work describes the objectives of a research project, nam...

Nanosatellites and unmanned aerial vehicles are attracting more and more the interest of both industrial and research fields. They are low-cost and easy deployable items, therefore their use is expected to quickly grow in the next few years. This work proposes a survey on the network architectures and the applications for nanosatellite swarms and c...

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is increasingly common in both research and industrial �elds. Nowadays, the use of single UAVs is quite established and several products are already available to consumers, while UAV swarms are still subject of research and development. This position paper describes the objectives of a research...

The fraction of machine-to-machine traffic carried by satellite networks is increasing, and an efficient delivery is required in order to enable a large set of applications that can benefit from the advantages provided by the use of satellites. This work analyses the use of random linear network coding techniques in land mobile satellite channels t...

This work presents an innovative, multidisciplinary and cost-effective ecosystem of ICT solutions able to collect, process and distribute geo-referenced information about the influence of pollution and micro-climatic conditions on the quality of life in Smart Cities. The system has been developed and experimentally evaluated in the framework of the...

Nowadays, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) traffic rate is increasing at a fast pace. The use of satellites is expected to play a large role in delivering such a traffic. In this work, we investigate the use of two of the most common M2M/IoT protocols stacks on a satellite Random Access (RA) channel, based on DVB-RCS2 standard....

Machine-to-machine services are witnessing an unprecedented diffusion, which is expected to result in an ever-increasing data traffic load. In this context, satellite technology is playing a pivotal role, since it enables a widespread provisioning of machine-to-machine services. In particular, oil industry, maritime communications, as well as remot...

The rapid evolution of the Web imposes the need of enhancing the HTTP over satellite channels. To this aim, SPDY is a protocol engineered to reduce download times of content rich pages, as well as for managing links characterized by large Round Trip Times (RTTs) and high packet losses. With such features, it could be an efficient solution to cope w...

In this paper, a fully meshed mobile ad hoc network is introduced as an alternative to a classical wide area network, as the Internet. Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and satellites are the enabling technologies of such a complex scenario with support to multilevel mobility, overlaid deployments, as well as techni...

During the last decade, the Web has grown in terms of complexity, while the evolution of the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) has not experienced the same trend. Even if HTTP 1.1 adds improvements like persistent connections and request pipelining, they are not decisive, especially in modern mixed wireless/wired networks, often including satellit...

Satellite networks are expected to support multimedia traffic flows, offering high capacity with QoS guarantees. However, system efficiency is often impaired due to erasure channel effects causing packet losses. Reconfigurable and adaptive air interfaces are possible solutions to alleviate some of the problems. On the other hand, network coding is...

The goal of this work was to understand the direction of the emerging web technologies and to evaluate their expected impact on satellite networking. Different aspects have been analysed using both real satellite testbeds and emulation platforms in different test sites in Europe. This analysis included an evaluation of those HTTP/2.0 specifications...

The direct consequence of the rapid growth of the demand for computational power by cloud based-applications has been the creation of an increasing number of large-scale data centres. In such a competitive market, each Cloud vendor needs to lower the price of the offered resources in order to increase its shares. This is done by reducing the cost a...

This work starts from the analysis of the literature about the Random Access protocols with contention resolution, such as Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA), and introduces a possible enhancement, named Generalized Encoding Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (GE-CRDSA). The GE-CRDSA aims at improving the aggregated th...

The increasing complexity ofWeb contents and the growing diffusion of mobile terminals, which use wireless and satellite links to get access to the Internet, impose the adoption of more specialized protocols. In particular, we focus on SPDY, a novel protocol introduced by Google to optimize the retrieval of complex webpages, to manage large Round T...

In this work, we discuss the radio propagation model of the UAVs when they act as mobile nodes belonging to a ground wireless sensor network. A typical application scenario is the agricultural field, where ground sensor nodes communicate with a flying node (the UAV). Currently, UAVs are attracting much attention both in the market and in the resear...

This paper presents a performance study relative to the coupling of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with the Contention Resolution Diversity slotted aloha (CRDSA) protocol, in the case of greedy TCP connections (also called elephants) on Digital Video Broadcasting-Return Channel via a geostationary satellite. CRDSA, which takes advantage of...

Random Access (RA) techniques have been included in the novel DVB-RCS2 standard due to an expected efficiency in addressing SCADA and M2M traffic. Such traffic relies on intermittent sources sending short messages on a periodic time scale. Efficiency is usually assessed in terms of layer-2 packet loss rate without taking into account indirect effec...

The rapid evolution of the Web imposes the need of enhancing the HTTP over satellite channels. To this aim, SPDY is a protocol engineered to reduce download times of content rich pages, as well as for managing links characterized by large Round Trip Times (RTTs) and high packet losses. With such features, it could be an efficient solution to cope w...

SUMMARY Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is an emerging technology introduced for deep-space communications to address both very large propagation delay or link disruptions. The DTN paradigm results promising in several satellite-based scenarios where either physical or service interruption might be experienced. This paper focuses on a set of select...

The deployment of sensor networks for emergency management must be considered as an irreplaceable support for both monitoring and rescue activities. The use of satellite links, as a segment of the network, ensures connectivity where no terrestrial networks are available and in some cases can also represent an efficient and cost effective mean to tr...

In this work, we discuss the two-ray radio propagation model when an UAV acts as a mobile node belonging to a ground wireless sensor network. Currently, UAVs are attracting attention in the market and in the research field, thus more accurate radio propagation models are needed to properly estimate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the use o...

Originally developed by Google, SPDY is an open protocol for reducing download times of content rich pages, as well as for managing channels characterized by large Round Trip Times (RTTs) and high packet losses. With such features, it could be an efficient solution to cope with performance degradations of Web 2.0 services used over satellite networ...

SUMMARY This paper surveys the most popular random access (RA), demand assignment (DA), and hybrids schemes for satellite broadband access networks. In addition, we present some recent research results that we obtained when a reliable transmission control protocol, that is, TCP, is coupled with the most promising RA methods foreseen in the second g...

This paper is not a survey related to generic wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which have been largely treated in a number of survey papers addressing more focused issues; rather, it specifically addresses architectural aspects related to WSNs in some way connected with a satellite link, a topic that presents challenging interworking aspects. The m...

Multimedia synchronization, Software Over the Air, Personal Information Management on Cloud networks require new reliable protocols, which reduce the traffic load in the core and edge network. This work shows via simulations the performance of an efficient multicast file delivery, which advantage of the distributed file storage in Cloud computing....

Resource allocation is one of the main tasks in a network, where different users and services have to share a pool of common resources. Satellite networks, with respect to cabled ones, in addition have to face long propagation delays and variable channel conditions, mainly due to signal attenuation because of bad atmospheric events, particularly in...