Angelo Trotta

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Computer Science and Engineering DISI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are able to learn and reason like humans are now widely used in a large number of real-world applications. Their performance has dramatically increased the degree to which we are able to address previously inaccessible tasks. However, the debate around such systems is now pivoting towards their non-function...

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a network of wireless devices that are used to monitor the health of individuals or provide them with information pertinent to their personal health. A WBAN typically consists of multiple sensors and a central sink and it enables the tracking of multiple body signals without the need for cables or other wired...

Complex IoT ecosystems often require the usage of Digital Twins (DTs) of their physical assets in order to perform predictive analytics and simulate what-if scenarios. DTs are able to replicate IoT devices and adapt over time to their behavioral changes. However, DTs in IoT are typically tailored to a specific use case, without the possibility to s...

Several use-cases of the Internet of Things (IoT) rely on the development of large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in harsh environments characterized by limited Internet connectivity and battery-powered operations. In such scenarios, the failure of a single node due to energy depletion or hardware issues may cause network partitions and disr...

Low latency is an essential constraint for many emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Cloud-based solutions can impose excessive network and processing latency that might hinder the system's operation. On the other hand, offloading tasks to the edge layer - close to where data is consumed - might be unfeasible in many situations due to th...

A swarm of cellular-connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enables new possibilities for emerging services and applications as the UAVs can autonomously coordinate their activities and cooperate to accomplish a given task. Because of spatio-temporal dynamics of swarm topology, robust and reliable network formation with seamless connectivity amon...

Digital Twins are crucial in Industry 4.0 IoT scenarios, as they replicate physical assets and enable important tasks such as predictive analytics, what-if scenarios and real time monitoring. The heterogeneity of IoT use cases usually makes the development of digital twins extremely application-specific as well as prone to interoperability issues....

In a swarm of unmanned aerial (UAVs) or ground vehicles (UGVs), nodes can autonomously coordinate their activities and cooperate to accomplish a given task as for instance the data exchange with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, due to the unpredictable environmental conditions, wireless communication on the air-to-air, ground-to-air and g...

Bluetooth Mesh is a recent SIG standard enabling the deployment of multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication links. The standard introduces many novel and interesting features in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, such as the seamless integration among sensors and mobile and wearable devices, and the...

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of t...

The ability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to communicate and cooperate among themselves in an aerial swarm network is of paramount importance for collaborative missions. It enables the swarm to function as a collective unit to plan trajectories, share tasks, coordinate flight route for collision avoidance or to optimize a given mission objecti...

The chaotic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) determined a fragmented landscape with a huge number of devices, technologies and platforms available on the market, and consequential issues of interoperability on many system deployments. The recent W3C Web of Things (WoT) standards aimed to ease the deployment of heterogeneous systems by introdu...

Recent Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems might take advantage of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for fine-grained and autonomic sensors data management and processing. Moreover, current SHM deployments often demand for the installation of multi-type and heterogeneous sensor devices capable to perform long-term measurements; from here...

The Web of Things (WoT) standard recently promoted by the W3C constitutes a promising approach to devise interoperable IoT systems able to cope with the heterogeneity of software platforms and devices. The WoT architecture envisages interconnected IoT scenarios characterized by a multitude of Web Things (WTs) that interact according to well-defined...

Warehouse management is a crucial task for most of nowadays' business activities. The usage of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been recently proposed to automatize the inventory process while increasing the safety for human workers. However, the practical deployment of UAV swarms in the target use-case must face many severe technical issu...

The rapid development of mobile officing applications promotes generation of large amount of Human Resource (HR) management data. This kind of mobile big data makes the traditional network architecture difficult to handle. Information centric networking (ICN) is a kind of network system which supports mobility naturally. It routes data by content n...

Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent a significant aid on scenarios where fixed, ground infrastructures are temporarily or permanently not available; this is the case of large-scale applications of the Internet of Things (IoTs), e.g. smart city and agriculture 3.0, where the UAVs can be employed as mobile data mules and gather the da...

The IoT is spreading heavily around us and many new standard at different architectural layers proliferate. This creates a heavy interoperability gap that many architectural proposals and new standards have tried to cope with over the years. In particular, we take into account the Arrowhead interoperability Framework, a powerful and promising parad...

UAV-aided Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute an energy- and cost-effective solution for the deployment of large-scale IoT monitoring systems. At the same time, the integration of UAVs into IoT scenarios poses some practical challenges which are far to be addressed, like the synchronization issue (how can the Wireless Ground Sensors (WGSs) b...

Aerial surveillance systems are a cost-effective and on-demand solution for smart city monitoring. However, the deployment of a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for continuous video capture of mobile ground target (MGT) activities poses new research issues in terms of energy management, scenario coverage, and multidevice task coordination....

The chaotic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) determined a fragmented landscape with a huge number of devices, technologies and platforms available on the market, and the consequential issues of interoperability on many system deployments. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture recently proposed by the W3C consortium constitutes a novel solution...

In the aftermath of a large-scale emergency, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can play a key role as mobile communication systems supporting rescue operations on the ground. At the same time, the deployment of autonomous UAV swarms still poses severe challenges in terms of distributed mobility, swarm connectivity and mesh networking. To this purpose...

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) allow easy deployment, three-dimensional maneuverability and high reconfigurability, as they sustain communication network in the absence of pre-installed infrastructure. The proposed FOg Computing in UAS Software-defined mesh network (FOCUS) paradigm aims to realize an implementable network design that considers prac...

In Industry 4.0 scenarios, novel applications are enabled by the capability to gather large amount of data from pervasive sensors and to process them in order to devise the “digital twin” of a physical equipment. The heterogeneity of hardware sensors, communication protocols and data formats constitutes one of the main challenge toward the large-sc...

Smartphone devices can play a key role on emergency scenarios thanks to their pervasiveness, and the possibility to convey emergency requests from the involved people to the rescue teams. At the same time, the effective utilization of such devices on critical scenarios with limited mobile Internet access is challenging. As an alternative, several r...

Proximity advertising, smart parking and tourism are just examples of use-cases of location-based services that have become extremely popular in the last few years, also thanks to the pervasive diffusion of GNSS-enabled mobile devices. These devices, however, are not able guarantee adequate accuracy in indoor scenarios, that represent the actual f...

In the next few years, the W3C Web of Things (WoT) platform will represent a reference solution toward the deployment of fully interoperable systems, hence unlocking the potential of the IoT paradigm on several use-cases characterized by the current fragmentation of devices and technologies. At the same time, the worlwide adoption of the W3C WoT ar...

In the next few years, the W3C Web of Things (WoT) platform will represent a reference solution toward the deployment of fully interoperable systems, hence unlocking the potential of the IoT paradigm on several use-cases characterized by the current fragmentation of devices and technologies. At the same time, the worlwide adoption of the W3C WoT ar...

Several recent studies demonstrated that the utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in combination with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can enhance the system performance in terms of lifetime and data delivery ratio; at the same time, the communication among Wireless Ground Sensors (WGSs) and UAVs poses several technical challenges which ar...

Accurate indoor localization constitutes a challenging yet fundamental research problem towards the large-scale deployment of next-generation mobile indoor location-based services. This paper addresses two key issues of indoor localization: (i) how to take benefit of the presence of inertial sensors, short-range and long-range radio interfaces on m...

In the era of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) several kinds of applications were born to make use of these autonomous vehicles, from surveillance to emergency management, from entertainment to package delivery. All these systems are based on the autonomous capability of the unmanned vehicles. The common factor of such systems is the use of an a...

During the occurrence of an emergency, being it the consequence of a natural disaster or of human activities, the pervasiveness of user-owned mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) turns into a precious help to convey data and services to all the people involved. As a result, several emergency-related mobile applications have been proposed on t...

In recent years, a rising numbers of people arrived in the European Union, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea or overland through Southeast Europe in what has been later named as the European migrant crisis. In the last 5 years, more than 16 thousands people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean sea during the crossing. The United Nations...

This paper proposes deployment strategies for consumer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maximize the stationary coverage of a target area and to guarantee the continuity of the service through energy replenishment operations at ground charging stations. The three main contributions of our work are as follows. 1) A centralized optimal solution is...

Internet of Things (IoTs)-based monitoring applications usually involve large-scale deployments of battery-enabled sensor nodes providing measurements at regular intervals. In order to guarantee the service continuity over time, the energy-efficiency of the networked system should be maximized. In this paper, we address such issue via a combination...

This paper proposes a network architecture and supporting optimization framework that allows Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform city-scale video monitoring of a set of Points of Interest (PoI). Our approach is systems-driven, relying on experimental studies to identify the permissible number of hops for multi-UAV video relaying in a noisy 3...

The current merging of networking and control research fields within the scope of robotic applications is creating fascinating research and development opportunities.However, the tools for a proper and easy management of experiments still lag behind.Although different solutions have been proposed to simulate and emulate control systems and, more sp...

Nowadays, people usually connect to the Internet through a multitude of different devices. Video streaming takes the lion's share of the bandwidth, and represents the real challenge for the service providers and for the research community. At the same time, most of the connections come from indoor, where Wi-Fi already experiences congestion and cov...

Several applications involving the utilization of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) require stationary and long-term coverage of a target area. Unfortunately, this goal is hard to achieve due the need for coordination and the limited flight autonomy of the SUAVs. In this paper, we investigate how to guarantee persistent coverage of a target ar...

After the digital TV switch-over, national spectrum regulators are considering opportunistic spectrum access techniques in the TV White Spaces (TVWS) frequency band. At present, the reference solution envisages the utilization of geolocation spectrum databases (GLDBs), in which spectrum availability is computed through complex propagation models. H...

In the aftermath of a natural calamity, relief operations can be hindered by damages to the terrestrial infrastructures (e.g. cellular base stations) that might lead to the disruption of wireless communication services. As a result, network partitions made up of isolated End-User (EU) devices, heterogeneous in terms of wireless access technologies...

Spectrum scarcity demands for additional bandwidth where new services can be deployed on. However, today's spectrum allocation leaves almost no bands unutilized. Thus, Cognitive Radio has been studied to bring relief the lack of spectrum, moving towards a more efficient and dynamic spectrum access. In this domain TV White Space have been proposed a...

Spontaneous wireless networks constructed out of mobile end-user devices (e.g. smartphones or tablets) are currently receiving considerable interest as they enable a wide range of novel, highly pervasive and user-centric network services and applications. In this paper, we focus on emergency-related scenarios, and we investigate the potential of sp...

Nowadays several mobile applications connect to the internet through 2G/3G/LTE, which are be-coming more crowded. Cognitive wireless networks have been proposed as a possible solution to sup-ply additional bandwidth, and more recently TV White Spaces (TVWS) have been investigated as one candidate. TVWS devices should contact a remote spectrum datab...

Download Citation Email Print Request Permissions Guaranteeing network connectivity in post-disaster scenarios is challenging yet crucial to save human lives and to coordinate the operations of first responders. In this paper, we investigate the utilization of low-altitude aerial mesh networks composed by Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) in...

The concept of smart city has emerged worldwide as a feasible answer to the challenges raised by the increasing urbanisation. From the technological point of view, guaranteeing ubiquitous connectivity, reliable communications and seamless integration of multiple network access technologies are mandatory in a smart city. This is in contrast with the...

Machine-to-Machine communications is envisioned to become one of the fundamental pillars of the future Internet of Things paradigm, enabling platoons of devices to be seamlessly connected and to cooperate over smart spaces. Among the possi- ble application scenarios, smart metering represents an already existing technology that might take benefit f...

Spontaneous networks among end-user devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) can guarantee emergency communication in post-disaster scenarios where the original infrastructure has been partially damaged by the occurrence of casualties. However, the heterogeneity of devices and wireless access technologies pose important challenges on the network deploym...

In this paper, we address the problem of reestablishing the network connectivity in post-disaster scenarios, where the original wireless infrastructure has been partitioned into multiple network fragments (called islands), operating on different frequencies. To this purpose, we propose the utilization of swarms of dedicated repairing units, called...

(* IEEE Med-Hoc-Net 2013 Best Paper Award) Network interoperability and self-organization constitute important requirements of wireless systems for disaster recovery operations. In these scenarios, the original communication infrastructure might be damaged as a consequences of natural calamities, and the whole network might be partitioned into mul...