There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/197439/1207.0203v1.pdf

Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions

This paper provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with emphasis on enabling technologies, protocols, and application issues. The IoT is enabled by the latest developments in RFID, smart sensors, communication technologies, and Internet protocols. The basic premise is to have smart sensors collaborate directly without human involvement to deliver a new class of applications. The current revolution in Internet, mobile, and machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies can be seen as the first phase of the IoT. In the coming years, the IoT is expected to bridge diverse technologies to enable new applications by connecting physical objects together in support of intelligent decision making. This paper starts by providing a horizontal overview of the IoT. Then, we give an overview of some technical details that pertain to the IoT enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. Compared to other survey papers in the field, our objective is to provide a more thorough summary of the most relevant protocols and application issues to enable researchers and application developers to get up to speed quickly on how the different protocols fit together to deliver desired functionalities without having to go through RFCs and the standards specifications. We also provide an overview of some of the key IoT challenges presented in the recent literature and provide a summary of related research work. Moreover, we explore the relation between the IoT and other emerging technologies including big data analytics and cloud and fog computing. We also present the need for better horizontal integration among IoT services. Finally, we present detailed service use-cases to illustrate how the different protocols presented in the paper fit together to deliver desired IoT services.

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and Applications

In recent year, the Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn significant research attention. IoT is considered as a part of the Internet of the future and will comprise billions of intelligent communicating `things'. The future of the Internet will consist of heterogeneously connected devices that will further extend the borders of the world with physical entities and virtual components. The Internet of Things (IoT) will empower the connected things with new capabilities. In this survey, the definitions, architecture, fundamental technologies, and applications of IoT are systematically reviewed. Firstly, various definitions of IoT are introduced; secondly, emerging techniques for the implementation of IoT are discussed; thirdly, some open issues related to the IoT applications are explored; finally, the major challenges which need addressing by the research community and corresponding potential solutions are investigated.

The internet of things: a survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to selected subsets of data for the development of a plethora of digital services. Building a general architecture for the IoT is hence a very complex task, mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we focus specifically to an urban IoT system that, while still being quite a broad category, are characterized by their specific application domain. Urban IoTs, in fact, are designed to support the Smart City vision, which aims at exploiting the most advanced communication technologies to support added-value services for the administration of the city and for the citizens. This paper hence provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling technologies, protocols, and architecture for an urban IoT. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss the technical solutions and best-practice guidelines adopted in the Padova Smart City project, a proof-of-concept deployment of an IoT island in the city of Padova, Italy, performed in collaboration with the city municipality.

/pdf/internet-of-things-for-smart-cities-u3qvvujxy2.pdf

Internet of Things for Smart Cities

In order to deal with buffer overflow in ATM-based high-speed networks, various techniques have been proposed and analysed. Push-out is a loss priority scheme which permits to share the buffer space among two classes of traffic, i.e. classes with different target losses. In this paper the major problem of such a scheme, the cost required for preserving cell sequence, is addressed and the idea of the push-out is generalized. Results are given when 3 kinds of traffic have to share the same buffer. As regards the gain over the implementation cost, results are shown when in presence of 2 different classes of traffic. A discrete-time model has been used for the analysis.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/3866/11284/00515723.pdf

'Push-out based' strategies for controlling the share of buffer space

Recently, millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology has attracted significant attention due to its ambitious promise to deal with the rapid growth in wireless data traffic. Moreover, mmWave is expected to constitute a foundation for the fifth-generation (5G) communication systems’ services, claimed to efficiently and effectively support both unicast and multicast transmission modes. However, the use of highly directional antennas at both user and access point sides is required to compensate for the severe path loss, high attenuation, and atmospheric absorption at extremely high-frequency bands, e.g., mmWave. Hence, multicast transmission needs special attention in directional systems due to the nature of group-oriented services, wherein a single beam simultaneously feeds receivers located at different positions. Since the widest possible beams at 60 GHz band are limited in terms of range and data rate and cannot serve all users, and, inversely, the use of only fine beams steered toward each user in unicast fashion requires long data transmission duration, the design of efficient directional multicast schemes is of utmost importance. Further, a slight beam misalignment due to mobility can generate a significant signal drop even between devices communicating in unicast fashions. The mission of this paper is to discuss the main challenges that must be faced to take advantage of mmWave communication for multicast data delivery. To this end, we investigate the performance of such systems in terms of data rate and data transmission duration via simulations considering both static and dynamic scenarios.

Challenges and Performance Evaluation of Multicast Transmission in 60 GHz mmWave

This paper proposes a methodology to use the RFID technology (more specifically the RFID tags) as a novel “communication channel”, to support data exchanges in high pervasive environments, analogously to more traditional short-range communication technologies (WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth). To this aim, the further research issue of creating so called RANs (RFID-Area Networks - in analogy with LANs, Local Area Networks, PANs, Personal Area Networks, etc.) is addressed. These are made up of groups of RFID readers into which the functionality for exchanging data over the introduced “RFID virtual channel” within the generic RAN, in either a broadcast or a unicast modality, is embedded. From initial studies on its functional behavior, it emerges that the proposed method may actually allow to exploit a further (currently largely wasted although available “at no cost”) channel in future scenarios populated by tagged everyday-life objects.

Using the RFID technology to create a low-cost communication channel for data exchange

Emerging extended reality (XR) services and applications that submerge users into a virtual universe pave the way toward ubiquitous contextualized experiences. Immersive interactions on the go not only bring new use cases but also distract users from the real world and modify their behavior and motion, which may, in turn, affect the operation of communication networks. This article explores the effects of XR user motion from the communication and computing perspectives. To this end, we offer a review of mobility patterns in XR and a detailed simulation study regarding the impact of interaction-dependent gait patterns on delay and resource utilization. The results confirm the uniqueness of XR applications in terms of user behavior patterns, which calls for novel application-centric algorithms, protocols, and mechanisms to facilitate high-performance connectivity under demanding XR requirements.

https://zenodo.org/record/7239893/files/Interplay_of_User_Behavior__Communication__and_Computing_in_Immersive_Reality_6G_Applications_after_major_revision_post_print.pdf

Interplay of User Behavior, Communication, and Computing in Immersive Reality 6G Applications

The widespread deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers paved the way for research activities focused on applications that go well beyond the mere identification of people and goods. In this context, the paper investigates an innovative paradigm, according to which the residual data storage capacity of passive RFID tags is used as a kind of “virtual” communication channel to exchange data in RFID ecosystems of the Internet of Things (IoT). The performance of the paradigm is assessed through the evaluation of a number of important communication parameters, such as goodput and delay. The analytical study, validated through simulations, evaluates the impact that the following key parameters have on the system performance: 1) radio channel errors; 2) collisions; 3) number of involved readers; 4) memory block reading size under noisy channel conditions; and 5) heterogeneous storage capacity of available tags. This allows obtaining design directives for a well-performing implementation of the proposed communication paradigm. In particular, accounting for the negative effects of channel errors on the system goodput, in this paper, we highlight the relationship between optimal memory reading block size and channel errors to maximize the communication performance.

Antonio Iera

Papers

'Push-out based' strategies for controlling the share of buffer space

Challenges and Performance Evaluation of Multicast Transmission in 60 GHz mmWave

Using the RFID technology to create a low-cost communication channel for data exchange

Interplay of User Behavior, Communication, and Computing in Immersive Reality 6G Applications

Assessing the Performance of a Novel Tag-Based Reader-to-Reader Communication Paradigm Under Noisy Channel Conditions