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Antonio Virdis

Publications and source records attributed to Antonio Virdis.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2022

An Outlook on the Future Marine Traffic Management System for Autonomous Ships

In the shipping digitalisation process, the peak will be reached with the advent of a wholly autonomous and at the same time safe and reliable ship. Full autonomy could be obtained by two linked Artificial-Intelligence systems representing the ship navigator and the ship engineer that possess sensing and analysis skills, situational awareness, planning, and control capabilities. Many efforts have been made in developing onboard systems; however, the shore facilities are not ready yet to deal with these new technologies. The paper aims to present the innovative technologies and methodologies needed to develop a futuristic Vessel Traffic System. The proposed systems will aim at faultless data acquisition and processing, provide input to decision-making systems, and suggest evasive manoeuvre; to deal with hazards and systems failure without human intervention onboard. The system is composed of three different and interacting layers. The first is an artificially intelligent tool to detect and control autonomous ships, thanks to situation recognition and obstacle avoidance strategies. The second is an orchestration and management platform designed to coordinate the sensing-actuation infrastructure and the AI algorithms results made available by multiple ships, mustering edge, and distributed computing techniques to fulfil the specific harsh requirements of the sea environment. The final part is a holistic guidance-navigation-control framework to manage autonomous ships navigation in a crowded area. Eventually, a cyber-physical scenario, using both a ship digital-twin and a real model-scale ship, is suggested to test and validate the innovative system without the availability of a full-scale scenario.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2022

Rapid prototyping and performance evaluation of MEC-based applications

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) will enable context-aware services for users of mobile 4G/5G networks. MEC application developers need tools to aid the design and the performance evaluation of their apps. During the early stages of deployment, they should be able to evaluate the performance impact of design choices - e.g., what round-trip delay can be expected due to the interplay of computation, communication and service consumption. When a prototype of the app exists, it needs to be tested it live, under controllable conditions, to measure key performance indicators. In this paper, we present an open-source framework that allows developers to do all the above. Our framework is based on Simu5G, the OMNeT++-based simulator of 5G (NewRadio) and 4G (LTE) mobile networks. It includes models of MEC entities (i.e., MEC orchestrator, MEC host, etc.) and provides a standard-compliant RESTful interface towards application endpoints. Moreover, it can interface with external applications, and can also run in real time. Therefore, one can use it as a cradle to run a MEC app live, having underneath both 4G/5G data packet transport and MEC services based on information generated by the underlying emulated radio access network. We describe our framework and present a use-case of an emulated MEC-enabled 5G scenario.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2021

Deployment and configuration of MEC apps with Simu5G

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is expected to act as the enabler for the integration of 5G (and future 6G) communication technologies with cloud-computing-based capabilities at the edge of the network. This will enable low-latency and context-aware applications for users of such mobile networks. In this paper we describe the implementation of a MEC model for the Simu5G simulator and illustrate how to configure the environment to evaluate MEC applications in both simulation and real-time emulation modes.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2019

Enabling Multi-hop Forwarding in 6LoWPANs through Software-Defined Networking

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a major role in the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) market as they allow the deployment of low cost and low power networks possibly in large areas. The introduction of the 6LoWPAN standard allowed WSN to move into the IPv6 era, with a seamless integration of sensors into external networks. The recent application of IoT in industrial systems is now introducing new traffic patterns - machine to machine (M2M) above the others - and communication challenges that can modify the classical multipoint-to-point pattern of WSN, having the sink as the root of every communication. To solve these problems, we propose an architecture to enable an efficient and controlled multi-hop forwarding over 6LoWPANs. We base our approach on the standard 6LoWPAN protocol stack and we exploit the Software Defined Networking paradigm to achieve network reconfigurability. We evaluate the performance of our architecture in a simulated environment, with both multipoint-to-point and M2M traffic, and we demonstrate its feasibility in a real testbed.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2017

Simulating Cellular Communications in Vehicular Networks: Making SimuLTE Interoperable with Veins

The evolution of cellular technologies toward 5G progressively enables efficient and ubiquitous communications in an increasing number of fields. Among these, vehicular networks are being considered as one of the most promising and challenging applications, requiring support for communications in high-speed mobility and delay-constrained information exchange in proximity. In this context, simulation frameworks under the OMNeT++ umbrella are already available: SimuLTE and Veins for cellular and vehicular systems, respectively. In this paper, we describe the modifications that make SimuLTE interoperable with Veins and INET, which leverage the OMNeT++ paradigm, and allow us to achieve our goal without any modification to either of the latter two. We discuss the limitations of the previous solution, namely VeinsLTE, which integrates all three in a single framework, thus preventing independent evolution and upgrades of each building block.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2016

Simulating device-to-device communications in OMNeT++ with SimuLTE: scenarios and configurations

SimuLTE is a tool that enables system-level simulations of LTE/LTE-Advanced networks within OMNeT++. It is designed such that it can be plugged within network elements as an additional Network Interface Card (NIC) to those already provided by the INET framework (e.g. Wi-Fi). Recently, device-to-device (D2D) technology has been widely studied by the research community, as a mechanism to allow direct communications between devices of a LTE cellular network. In this work, we present how SimuLTE can be employed to simulate both one-to-one and one-to-many D2D communications, so that the latter can be exploited as a new communication opportunity in several research fields, like vehicular networks, IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2016

Automating Large-Scale Simulation and Data Analysis with OMNeT++: Lession Learned and Future Perspectives

Simulation is widely adopted in the study of modern computer networks. In this context, OMNeT++ provides a set of very effective tools that span from the definition of the network, to the automation of simulation execution and quick result representation. However, as network models become more and more complex to cope with the evolution of network systems, the amount of simulation factors, the number of simulated nodes and the size of results grow consequently, leading to simulations with larger scale. In this work, we perform a critical analysis of the tools provided by OMNeT++ in case of such large-scale simulations. We then propose a unified and flexible software architecture to support simulation automation.

cs.PF↗
arXiv2015

Optimization in the Loop: Implementing and Testing Scheduling Algorithms with SimuLTE

One of the main purposes of discrete event simulators such as OMNeT++ is to test new algorithms or protocols in realistic environments. These often need to be benchmarked against optimal/theoretical results obtained by running commercial optimization solvers. The usual way to do this is to have the simulator run in a standalone mode and generate (few) snapshots, which are then fed to the optimization solvers. This allows one to compare the optimal and suboptimal solutions in the snapshots, but does not allow to assess how the system being studied would evolve over time if the optimal solution was enforced every time. This requires optimization software to run directly in the loop of the simulation, exchanging information with the latter. The goal of this tutorial is to show how to integrate a commercial solver (CPLEX) into the simulation loop of the OMNeT++ environment. For this purpose, we propose two methods: a first one that uses a solver as an external program, and a second one that exploits a C-written API for CPLEX known as Callable Library. We then exemplify how to apply these two methods to SimuLTE, a simulation model for LTE cellular networks, implementing and testing a simple solution to a well-known resource-scheduling problem.

cs.NI↗