Michele Segata

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Beyond 5G/6G communication systems promise to significantly impact the development of a New Generation of CCAM. Reconfigurable Intelligent Metasurfaces (RIM) are by now established as a key enabling technology for 6G Systems. They have been extensively investigated the last few years, as they possess exotic properties allowing for precise control o...

Future cooperative autonomous vehicles will require high-performance communication means to support functions such as cooperative maneuvering and cooperative perception. The high-bandwidth requirements of these functions can be met through mmWave communications, whose utilization is often hindered by the harsh propagation conditions of typical vehi...

Connected cars are becoming more common. With the development of multi-access edge computing (MEC) for low-latency applications, it will be possible to manage the cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC, also known as platooning) of such vehicles from the edge of cellular networks. In this paper, we present a controller that carries out platoonin...

Inter-vehicle communications may have many reasons to be, but improving road safety and efficiency is arguably the only reason that may differentiate them from other communication infrastructures and justify a special effort in their study and deployment. This work overviews (some of) the past research on the topic to draw some lessons for the futu...

Cooperative Driving requires ultra-reliable communications, and it is now clear that no single technology will ever be able to satisfy such stringent requirements, if only because active jamming can kill (almost) any wireless technology. Cooperative driving with multiple communication technologies which complement each other opens new spaces for re...

In the recent past, platooning evolved into an attractive cooperative driving technology, broadly discussed in research and practice. Vehicles in platoons use cooperative adaptive cruise control to drive at close distances to each other. Platooning (i) increases the capacity of the street by a factor of 2; (ii) reduces the fuel consumption and emis...

The technical maturity of autonomous driving enables the discussion of beneficial use cases to leverage its full potential. In this paper, we target one such use case: Platooning is the efficient convoying of vehicles by making use of self-driving capabilities and inter-vehicle communication. Many advantages arise from grouping vehicles in platoons...

The demand for passenger and freight transportation has grown sharply over the last decades and will triple by 2050. This also dramatically impacts the environment as traffic is one of the primary sources of CO2 emission. Platooning, which is defined as driving automated vehicles in convoys with minimal inter-vehicle distance enabled by vehicular c...

Recent developments by companies as Waymo, Uber, or Tesla show that autonomous driving is no science fiction anymore. Coordinated driving applications such as platooning, i.e., driving in convoys of coordinated vehicles, use the full potential of the automation. In this paper, we present a simulation framework for analyzing platooning coordination...

Vehicular networks supporting cooperative driving are among the most interesting and challenging ad-hoc networks. Platooning, or the act of coordinating a set of vehicles through an ad-hoc network, promises to improve traffic safety, and at the same time reduce congestion and pollution. The design of the control system for this application is chall...

We describe Veins, an open-source model library for (and a toolbox around) OMNeT++, which supports researchers conducting simulations involving communicating road vehicles—either as the main focus of a study or as a component. Veins already includes a full stack of simulation models for investigating cars and infrastructure communicating via IEEE 8...

Recent developments in communication technology have led to cloud resources becoming ubiquitous. These resources enable many new applications by offering computational power for remote embedded devices. In combination with advances in the area of smart driving, this seems to be especially beneficial for applications such as remote maintenance of ve...

Cooperative driving is an essential component of future intelligent road systems. It promises greater safety, reducing accidents due to drivers distraction, improved infrastructure utilization, and fuel consumption reduction with platooning applications. Proper platoon management requires Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC), longitudinal control an...

The trend toward autonomous driving and the recent advances in vehicular networking led to a number of very successful proposals in cooperative driving. Maneuvers can be coordinated among participating vehicles and controlled by means of wireless communications. One of the most challenging scenarios or applications in this context is cooperative ad...

Cooperative platooning has been proposed as a promising solution to traffic congestion, safety, and pollution. A platooning application forms road trains of vehicles that autonomously follow a common leader, separated by a small inter-vehicle gap. In terms of traffic efficiency, platooning should improve the vehicular flow and reduce shock waves. T...

We present a complete simulation and experimentation framework for IEEE 802.11p. The core of the framework is an SDR-based OFDM transceiver that we validated extensively by means of simulations, interoperability tests, and, ultimately, by conducting a field test. Being SDR-based, the transceiver offers important benefits: It provides access to all...

Full-duplex radios are becoming a feasible reality thanks to recent advances in self-interference cancellation. Switching from half- to full-duplex requires a major re-design of many network features and characteristics, including the MAC layer. The literature provides several new proposals or improvements that are applicable in different topologie...

Clustering has been an important concept in the scope of vehicular networks. The idea is to reduce channel contention, enable building backbones and might improve spatial reuse. We propose a seemingly simple, yet unexplored idea: extending IEEE 802.11 frame bursting MAC access to multiple stations aggregated into a cluster. We call this approach Di...

Cluster-based communication is a staple topic in vehicular networks. Clustering communication nodes promise to reduce channel contention, enable building backbones and might improve spatial reuse. In this paper we propose a seemingly simple, yet unexplored idea: extending 802.11 frame bursting MAC access to multiple stations aggregated into a clust...

Automated and coordinated vehicles' driving (platooning) is very challenging due to the multibody control complexity and the presence of unreliable time-varying wireless intervehicular communication (IVC). We propose a novel controller for vehicle platooning based on consensus and analytically demonstrate its stability and dynamic properties. Tradi...

Platooning, which is the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potential to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block: It is needed to manage and maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in...

An Intersection Assistance System aim to assist road users in avoiding collisions at intersections, either by warning the driver or by triggering automated actions. Such a system can be realized based on passive scanning only (e.g., using LiDAR) or supported by active Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC). The main reason to use Inter-Vehicle Communica...

Cooperative driving in general and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) or platooning in particular require blending control theory, communications and networking, as well as mechanics and physics. Given the lack of an integrated modeling framework and theory as well as the prohibitively high costs of using prototypes for what-if studies, sim...

Platooning, the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potentials to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block - it is needed to manage and to maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in term...

We study the ability of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) solutions to handle real-time requirements in safety scenarios using beaconing as a communication primitive. One of the envisioned safety applications is intersection assistance. The objective of such applications is to either warn the driver or even to act autonomously if other approaching...

Many people use smart phones on a daily basis, yet, their energy consumption is pretty high and the battery power lasts typically only for a single day. In the scope of the EnAct project, we investigate potential energy savings on smart phones by offloading computationally expensive tasks into the cloud. Obviously, also the wireless communication f...

Finding viable metrics to assess the effectiveness of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in terms of ‘safety’ is one of the major challenges in vehicular networking research. We aim to provide a metric, an estimation of the vehicle collision probability at intersections, that can be used for evaluating Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) concep...

Driving vehicles in platoons has the potential to improve trafficefficiency, increase safety, reduce fuel consumption, and make drivingexperience more enjoyable. A lot of effort is being spent in thedevelopment of technologies, like radars, enabling automated cruise controlfollowing and ensuring emergency braking if the driver does not react intime...

Simulations play a fundamental role for the evaluation of vehicular network communication strategies and applications' effectiveness. Therefore, the vehicular networking community is continuously seeking more realistic channel and reception models to provide more reliable results, yet maintaining scalability in terms of computational effort. We inv...

We present the first steps towards an Open Source simulation and experimentation framework for IEEE 802.11p networks. The framework is implemented based on GNURadio, a real-time signal processing framework for use in Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems. The core of the framework is a modular Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transc...

Safety applications are among the key drivers in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) research, and their true performance can be only assessed if the application and the communication network are jointly considered. This paper presents a simulation study of an emergency braking (EB) application accomplished by embedding mobility, cars' dynamic, and dr...

We present an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) receiver toolkit that is able to decode OFDM frames of IEEE 802.11a/g/p WiFi in real time. It is the first for GNURadio that supports channel bandwidths of up to 20MHz. The toolkit comprises the physical layer, decoding of MAC frames, and extracting the payload of IEEE 802.11a/g/p frames. It is...

We just released an Open Source receiver that is able to decode IEEE 802.11a/g/p Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) frames in software. This is the first Software Defined Radio (SDR) based OFDM receiver supporting channel bandwidths up to 20MHz that is not relying on additional FPGA code. Our receiver comprises all layers from the ph...

Experimental research on wireless communication protocols frequently requires full access to all protocol layers, down to and including the physical layer. Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware platforms, together with real-time signal processing frameworks, offer a basis to implement transceivers that can allow such experimentation and sophisticat...

We aim to resolve a long standing dispute in the vehicular networking community when it comes to modeling the physical layer most accurately. Essentially, two major groups have formed: one believes that shadowing is the most important source of signal attenuation (and fading can essentially be ignored); the other argues that the exact opposite is t...

We study the effect of radio signal shadowing dynamics, caused by vehicles and by buildings, on the performance of beaconing protocols in Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC). Recent research indicates that beaconing, i.e., one hop message broadcast, shows excellent characteristics and can outperform other communication approaches for both safety an...

Is it possible to estimate some 'safety' metric to assess the effectiveness of Intelligent Transportation Systems? In particular, we are interested in using Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) beaconing for increasing drivers' safety at intersections. In the last couple of years, the vehicular networking community reported in several studies that sim...

Automated platooning is one of the most challenging fields in the domain of ITS. Conceptually, platooning means creating clusters of vehicles which closely follow each other autonomously without action of the driver, neither for accelerating, nor for braking. This leads to several important benefits from substantially improved road throughput to in...

The goal of this work is to highlight and explain the limitations of traditional physical channel models used in network simulators for wireless LANs, with particular reference to VANETs, where these limitations may jeopardize the validity of results, specially for safety applications. The fundamental tradeoff is between simulation time and realism...

Safety applications are among the key drivers in VANET research. Their study is complex as it encompasses different disciplines, from wireless networking to car dynamics, to drivers' behavior, not to mention the economic and legal aspects. This work presents a simulative study of emergency braking applications tackled by embedding a mobility, cars'...

The network research community is working in the field of automotive to provide VANET based safety applications to reduce the number of accidents, deaths, injuries and loss of money. Several approaches are proposed and investigated in VANET literature, but in a completely network-oriented fashion. Most of them do not take into account application r...