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357
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Introduction
I'm currently working on SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING (focus on data plane programmability and ICN), NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE SHARING (focus on techno-economic modelling), RADIO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (focus on interference coordination, millimeter wave access, 5G), NETWORK DATA ANALYSIS (focus on KPIs for cellular operators), GREEN NETWORKS (focus on energy efficient network management in IP and cellular networks), COMMUNICATIONS FOR THE SMART GRID (focus on green metering, demand side management).
Additional affiliations
December 2014 - February 2015
August 2011 - present
March 2005 - July 2011
Publications
Publications (357)
The fronthaul connection is a key component of Centralized RAN (C-RAN) architectures, consistently required to handle high capacity demands. However, this critical feature is at risk when the transport link relies on wireless technology. Fortunately, solutions exist to enhance the reliability of wireless links. In this paper, we recall the theoreti...
Direct communication among vehicles, namely vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), as part of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) system, will enable most of the upcoming Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) applications. Nevertheless, the challenging requirements imposed by the vehicular environment necessitate advanced control mechanisms. Traditional Radio Access...
The emergence of Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) has revolutionized mobile network infrastructure, offering streamlined cell-site engineering and enhanced network management capabilities. As C-RAN gains momentum, the focus shifts to optimizing fronthaul links. While fiber fronthaul guarantees performance, wireless alternatives provide cost efficiency and s...
Vehicular communications at high frequencies are envisioned to be a breakthrough application for the 6G cellular systems. Traditional Radio Access Networks (RANs) lack the flexibility to enable sophisticated control mechanisms that are demanded by the strict performance requirements of the dynamic vehicular environment. In contrast, the features of...
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications has been recently standardized for use in the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, fulfilling the promise of multi-gigabit mobile throughput of current and future mobile radio network generations. In this context, the network densification required to overcome the difficult mmWave propagation will resu...
The advances in the automotive industry with the ever-increasing request for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are pushing for a new epoch of networked wireless systems. Vehicular communications, or Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), are expected to be among the main actors of the future beyond 5G and 6G networks. However, the challenging applicat...
The paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all architecture to a service-oriented network infrastructure promised by network slicing will demand novel technical solutions, as well as new business models. In particular, the role separation between infrastructure providers, i.e. the ones owning the network, and slice tenants, i.e. the ones providing spe...
As we move from 5G to 6G, edge computing is one of the concepts that needs revisiting. Its core idea is still intriguing: Instead of sending all data and tasks from an end user's device to the cloud, possibly covering thousands of kilometers and introducing delays lower-bounded by propagation speed, edge servers deployed in close proximity to the u...
As we move from 5G to 6G, edge computing is one of the concepts that needs revisiting. Its core idea is still intriguing: instead of sending all data and tasks from an end user's device to the cloud, possibly covering thousands of kilometers and introducing delays that are just owed to limited propagation speed, edge servers deployed in close proxi...
The introduction of the mm-Wave spectrum into 5G NR promises to bring about unprecedented data throughput to future mobile wireless networks, but comes with several challenges. Network densification has been proposed as a viable solution to increase RAN resilience and newly introduced IAB is considered as a key enabling technology with compelling c...
With the capability to support gigabit data rates, millimetre-wave (mm-Wave) communication is unanimously considered a key technology of future cellular networks. However, the harsh propagation at such high frequencies makes these networks quite susceptible to failures due to obstacle blockages. Recently introduced Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfac...
Programmable network hardware is emerging as a viable option for offloading and thus accelerating network functions. However, the heterogeneous resources available in the network calls for a disaggregated deployment approach. Programmable switches, programmable Network Interface Cards (NICs), and in-network compute nodes exposes different peculiar...
Infrastructure sharing for mobile networks has been a prolific research topic for more than three decades now. The key driver for Mobile Network Operators to share their network infrastructure is cost reduction. Spectrum sharing is often studied alongside infrastructure sharing although on its own it is a vast research topic outside the scope of th...
Ideally, the network should be dynamically reconfigured as traffic evolves. Yet, even within the software defined network paradigm, network reconfigurations cannot be too frequent due to a number of reasons related to route consistency, forwarding rules instantiation, individual flows dynamics, traffic monitoring overhead, and so on. In this paper,...
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might radically change the relations among different actors of the telecommunications ecosystem, where new players, active in different markets, could benefit of tailored connectivity services based on different business strategies. We...
The ability of TCP’s congestion control scheme to adapt the rate of traffic flows and fairly use all the available resources is one of the Internet’s pillars. So far, however, the elasticity of traffic has been disregarded in traffic engineering (TE) methodologies mainly because, only recently, the increase in access capacity has moved the bottlene...
The book “Green, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Networks” represents a collection of 18 high-quality papers published as a Special Issue of Sensors. The published papers are self-contained peer-reviewed scientific works corresponding to the work of more than 80 authors from academia and industry. Among the published papers, there is one editorial...
Although information and communications technologies (ICTs) have the potential of enabling powerful social, economic and environmental benefits, ICT systems give a non-negligible contribution to world electricity consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint. This contribution will sustain since the increased demand for user′s connectivity and an...
Although the contribution of information and communications technology's (ICTs) systems to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cannot be completely eliminated, these contributions should be maximally reduced, in order to limit the exponential increase in energy consumption and GHG emission trends. To face this challenge, im...
One of the key advantages of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) is the opportunity to integrate Traffic Engineering modules able to optimize network configuration according to traffic. Ideally, the network should be dynamically reconfigured as traffic evolves, so as to achieve remarkable gains in the efficient use of resources with respect to traditio...
The problem of transmission scheduling in single hop and multi-hop wireless networks has been extensively studied. The focus has been on optimizing the efficiency of transmission parallelization, through a minimum-length schedule that meets a given set of traffic demands using the smallest possible number of time slots. Each time slot is associated...
Expanding the market of mobile network services and defining solutions that are cost efficient are the key challenges for next generation mobile networks. Network slicing is commonly considered to be the main instrument to exploit the flexibility of the new radio interface and core network functions. It targets splitting resources among services wi...
Ideally, the network should be dynamically reconfigured as traffic evolves. Unfortunately, even in SDN paradigm, network recon-figurations cannot be too frequent due to a number of reasons related to route stability, forwarding rules instantiation, individual flows dynamics, traffic monitoring overhead, etc. In this paper, we focus on the fundament...
This paper proposes a novel semi-distributed and practical ICIC scheme based on the Almost Blank SubFrame (ABSF) approach specified by 3GPP. We define two mathematical programming problems for the cases of guaranteed and best-effort traffic, and use game theory to study the properties of the derived ICIC distributed schemes, which are compared in d...
Communication and computing systems have increasing environmental footprint due to the significant amounts of greenhouse gas emission and energy consumption. To address such problems and create a sustainable environment, green communications and computing solutions should be designed with new methodologies, tools, algorithms, energy models, platfor...
The exploitation of mm-wave bands is one of the key-enabler for 5G mobile radio networks. However, the introduction of mm-wave technologies in cellular networks is not straightforward due to harsh propagation conditions that limit the mm-wave access availability. Mm-wave technologies require high-gain antenna systems to compensate for high path los...
Every time an Internet user downloads a video, shares a picture, or sends an email, his/her device addresses a data center and often several of them. These complex systems feed the web and all Internet applications with their computing power and information storage, but they are very energy hungry. The energy consumed by Information and Communicati...
Softwarization is the current trend of networking based on the success of technologies like Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Virtualization. Network as a Service (NaaS) is a new paradigm based on virtualization that enables customers to instantiate their virtual networks over a physical substrate network, mapping necessary resources by...
Visual Sensor Networks (VSNs) constitute a key technology for the implementation of several visual analysis tasks. Recent studies have demonstrated that such tasks can be efficiently performed following an operative paradigm where cameras transmit to a central controller local image features, rather than pixel-domain images. Furthermore, features f...
Although a number of different medium access control (MAC) schemes are adopted for wireless multi-hop networks, time division multiple access (TDMA) approaches based on a periodic frame of time slots are the most common when very high efficiency is needed in terms of use of radio and energy resources. Efficient resource usage is typically based on...
Network slicing allows mobile network operators to open their physical network infrastructure platform to the concurrent deployment of multiple logical self-contained networks, i.e., network slices. In this paper we propose and analyze ONETS: an Online NETwork Slicing solution that (i) builds on the budgeted lock-up multi-armed bandit mathematical...
Network slicing allows mobile network operators to open their physical network infrastructure platform to the concurrent deployment of multiple logical self-contained networks, i.e., network slices. In this paper we propose and analyze ONETS: an Online NETwork Slicing solution that (i) builds on the budgeted lock-up multi-armed bandit mathematical...
One of the key advantages of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) is the opportunity to integrate traffic engineering modules able to optimize network configuration according to traffic. Ideally, network should be dynamically reconfigured as traffic evolves, so as to achieve remarkable gains in the efficient use of resources with respect to traditional...
Energy consumption of information and communication networks has continued to grow faster than global electricity consumption, what makes optimization of network energy consumption a new target for competitive differentiation and innovation. For that reason, improving the energy efficiency of information and communication systems and networks becom...
This paper proposes a novel semi-distributed and practical ICIC scheme based on the Almost Blank SubFrame (ABSF) approach specified by 3GPP. We define two mathematical programming problems for the cases of guaranteed and best-effort traffic, and use game theory to study the properties of the derived ICIC distributed schemes, which are compared in d...
The articles in this special section focus on network slicing for 5G mobile communication. The emerging fifth generation (5G) networks are expected to support a plethora of different services and applications with diverse and often conflicting performance requirements. Network slicing enables network operators to allocate logical self-contained net...
The exploitation of mm-wave bands is one of the key-enabler for 5G mobile radio networks. However, the introduction of mm-wave technologies in cellular networks is not straightforward due to harsh propagation conditions that limit the mm-wave access availability. Mm-wave technologies require high-gain antenna systems to compensate for high path los...
The articles in this special section focus on the technologies, applications, and services supported by 5G mobile commuincations.
The rapid evolution of mobile radio network technologies poses severe technical and economical challenges to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs); on the economical side, the continuous roll-out of technology updates is highly expensive, which may lead to the extreme where offering advanced mobile services becomes no longer affordable for MNOs which thu...
Supporting programmable stateful packet forwarding functions in hardware requires a tight balance between functionality and performance. Current state-of-the-art solutions are based on a very conservative model that assumes worst-case workloads. This finally limits the programmability of the system, even if actual deployment conditions may be very...
Supporting the programming of stateful packet forwarding functions in hardware has recently attracted the interest of the research community. When designing such switching chips, the challenge is to guarantee the ability to program functions that can read and modify data plane's state, while keeping line rate performance and state consistency. Curr...
This article introduces the ideas investigated in the BCG ² project of the GreenTouch consortium. The basic concept is to separate signaling and data in the wireless access network. Transmitting the signaling information separately maintains coverage even when the whole data network is adapted to the current load situation. Such network-wide adapta...
The Smart Meter (SM) is an essential tool for successful balancing the demand-offer energy curve. It allows the linking of the consumption and production measurements with the time information and the customer’s identity, enabling the substitution of flat-price billing with smarter solutions, such as Time-of-Use or Real-Time Pricing. In addition to...
The exponential growth of mobile traffic is forcing operators to quickly increase the capacity of their networks by means of new technologies and advanced architectures. This capacity expansion not only brings increasing fixed costs for additional network infrastructures, but also inflates operational costs, which are becoming critical, mainly in t...
The introduction of mm-wave technologies in the future 5G networks poses a rich set of network access challenges. We need new ways of dealing with legacy network functionalities to fully unleash their great potential, among them the cell discovery procedure is one of the most critical. In this article, we propose novel cell discovery algorithms enh...
When dealing with node or link failures in software-defined networking (SDN), the network capability to establish an alternative path depends on controller reachability and on the round-trip times between controller and involved switches. Moreover, current SDN data plane abstractions for failure detection, such as OpenFlow “Fast-failover,” do not a...
To accommodate the ever-growing traffic load and bandwidth demand generated by mobile users, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) need to frequently invest in high spectral efficiency technologies and increase their hold of spectrum resources; MNOs have then to weigh between building individual networks or entering into network and spectrum sharing agre...
Communication technologies continue to be a central element of the transition to smart, energy-efficient and sustainable lifestyles. However, energy requirements of communication systems are a challenging problem that is already straining operating budgets and attracting the attention of policy makers around the world. For that reason, improving en...