arXiv subjects

Andrea Pimpinella

Publications and source records attributed to Andrea Pimpinella.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Analyzing Zigbee Traffic: Datasets, Classification and Storage Trade-offs

Zigbee is widely used in smart home environments due to its low power consumption and support for mesh networking, making it a relevant target for traffic-based IoT forensic analysis. However, existing studies often rely on limited datasets and fixed network configurations. In this paper, we analyze Zigbee network traffic from three complementary perspectives: data collection, traffic classification, and storage efficiency. We introduce ZIOTP2025, a publicly available dataset of Zigbee traffic collected from commercial smart home devices deployed under multiple network configurations and capturing realistic interaction scenarios. Using this dataset, we study two traffic classification tasks: device type classification and individual device identification, and evaluate their robustness under both intra-configuration and cross-configuration settings. Our results show that while high classification accuracy can be achieved under controlled conditions, performance degrades significantly when models are evaluated across different network configurations, particularly for fine-grained identification tasks. Finally, we investigate the trade-off between traffic storage requirements and classification accuracy. We show that lossy compression of traffic features through quantization can reduce storage requirements by approximately 4-5x compared to lossless storage of raw packet traces, while preserving near-lossless classification performance. Overall, our results highlight the need for topology-aware Zigbee traffic analysis and storage-efficient feature compression to enable robust and scalable IoT forensic systems.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Lossy Compression of Cellular Network KPIs

Network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a fundamental component of mobile cellular network monitoring and optimization. Their massive volume, resulting from fine-grained measurements collected across many cells over long time horizons, poses significant challenges for storage, transport, and large-scale analysis. In this letter, we show that common cellular KPIs can be efficiently compressed using standard lossy compression schemes based on prediction, quantization, and entropy coding, achieving substantial reductions in reporting overhead. Focusing on traffic volume KPIs, we first characterize their intrinsic compressibility through a rate-distortion analysis, showing that signal-to-noise ratios around 30 dB can be achieved using only 3-4 bits per sample, corresponding to an 8-10x reduction with respect to 32-bit floating-point representations. We then assess the impact of KPI compression on representative downstream analytics tasks. Our results show that aggregation across cells mitigates quantization errors and that prediction accuracy is unaffected beyond a moderate reporting rate. These findings indicate that KPI compression is feasible and transparent to network-level analytics in cellular systems.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Forecasting Busy-Hour Downlink Traffic in Cellular Networks

The dramatic growth in cellular traffic volume requires cellular network operators to develop strategies to carefully dimension and manage the available network resources. Forecasting traffic volumes is a fundamental building block for any proactive management strategy and is therefore of great interest in such a context. Differently from what found in the literature, where network traffic is generally predicted in the short-term, in this work we tackle the problem of forecasting busy hour traffic, i.e., the time series of observed daily maxima traffic volumes. We tackle specifically forecasting in the long term (one, two months ahead) and we compare different approaches for the task at hand, considering different forecasting algorithms as well as relying or not on a cluster-based approach which first groups network cells with similar busy hour traffic profiles and then fits per-cluster forecasting models to predict the traffic loads. Results on a real cellular network dataset show that busy hour traffic can be forecasted with errors below 10% for look-ahead periods up to 2 months in the future. Moreover, when clusters are available, we improve forecasting accuracy up to 8% and 5% for look-ahead of 1 and 2 months, respectively.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Unsatisfied Today, Satisfied Tomorrow: a simulation framework for performance evaluation of crowdsourcing-based network monitoring

Network operators need to continuosly upgrade their infrastructures in order to keep their customer satisfaction levels high. Crowdsourcing-based approaches are generally adopted, where customers are directly asked to answer surveys about their user experience. Since the number of collaborative users is generally low, network operators rely on Machine Learning models to predict the satisfaction levels/QoE of the users rather than directly measuring it through surveys. Finally, combining the true/predicted user satisfaction levels with information on each user mobility (e.g, which network sites each user has visited and for how long), an operator may reveal critical areas in the networks and drive/prioritize investments properly. In this work, we propose an empirical framework tailored to assess the quality of the detection of under-performing cells starting from subjective user experience grades. The framework allows to simulate diverse networking scenarios, where a network characterized by a small set of under-performing cells is visited by heterogeneous users moving through it according to realistic mobility models. The framework simulates both the processes of satisfaction surveys delivery and users satisfaction prediction, considering different delivery strategies and evaluating prediction algorithms characterized by different prediction performance. We use the simulation framework to test empirically the performance of under-performing sites detection in general scenarios characterized by different users density and mobility models to obtain insights which are generalizable and that provide interesting guidelines for network operators.

cs.NI↗