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[EN] Understanding the human genome is a big research challenge. The huge complexity and amount of genome data require extremely effective and efficient data management policies. A first crucial point is to obtain a shared understanding of the domain, which becomes a very hard task considering the number of different genome data sources. To make things more complicated, those data sources deal with different parts of genome-based information: we not only need to understand them well, but also to integrate and intercommunicate all the relevant information. The protein perspective is a good example: rich, well-known repositories such as UniProt provide a lot of valuable information that it is not easy to interpret and manage when we want to generate useful results. Proteomes and basic information, protein-protein interaction, protein structure, protein processing events, protein function, etc. provide a lot of information is that needs to be conceptually characterized and delimited. To facilitate the essential common understanding of the domain, this paper uses the case of proteins to analyze the data provided by Uniprot in order to make a sound conceptualization work for identifying the relevant domain concepts. A conceptual model of proteins is the result of this conceptualization process, explained in detail in this work. This holistic conceptual model of proteins presented in this paper is the result of achieving a precise ontological commitment. It establishes concepts and their relationships that are significant in order to have a solid basis to efficiently manage relevant genome data related to proteins.

[EN] The Directive (EU) 2015/653 aimed at facilitating that the maximum force that any disabled driver could make on the vehicle's primary controls could be adjusted to their needs. The technical adjustment in the vehicle's design requires a measurement of the operational forces applied by the driver on the steering and brake controls, in order to determine its functional capacity during the execution of driving maneuvers. The objective of this paper is to define the steering and braking operative forces used for driving current market M1 motor vehicles for the ¿fitness to drive assessment of drivers with physical disabilities. A total of 200 trials were performed with 17 different vehicles and 26 drivers. The results obtained help to define a new threshold's criteria for operative forces onto the steering and braking systems for adapting motor vehicles to disabled drivers. The main contribution of this paper consist on a new technical recommendations about the use of code 20.07 -braking- and 40.01 -steering- to be used in the ¿fitness to drive assessment of driver with disabilities according to Directive (EU) 2015/653 requirements.

[EN] Although Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks and deep Transformers are now extensively used in offline ASR, it is unclear how best offline systems can be adapted to work with them under the streaming setup. After gaining considerable experience on this regard in recent years, in this paper we show how an optimized, low-latency streaming decoder can be built in which bidirectional LSTM acoustic models, together with general interpolated language models, can be nicely integrated with minimal performance degradation. In brief, our streaming decoder consists of a one-pass, real-time search engine relying on a limited-duration window sliding over time and a number of ad hoc acoustic and language model pruning techniques. Extensive empirical assessment is provided on truly streaming tasks derived from the well-known LibriSpeech and TED talks datasets, as well as from TV shows on a main Spanish broadcasting station.

[EN] Although Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks and deep Transformers are now extensively used in offline ASR, it is unclear how best offline systems can be adapted to work with them under the streaming setup. After gaining considerable experience on this regard in recent years, in this paper we show how an optimized, low-latency streaming decoder can be built in which bidirectional LSTM acoustic models, together with general interpolated language models, can be nicely integrated with minimal performance degradation. In brief, our streaming decoder consists of a one-pass, real-time search engine relying on a limited-duration window sliding over time and a number of ad hoc acoustic and language model pruning techniques. Extensive empirical assessment is provided on truly streaming tasks derived from the well-known LibriSpeech and TED talks datasets, as well as from TV shows on a main Spanish broadcasting station.

[EN] Integration of renewable energy sources require an increase in the flexibility of power systems. Demand response is a valuable flexible resource that is not currently being fully exploited. Small and medium industrial consumers can deliver a wide range of underused flexibility resources associated with the electricity consumption in their production processes. Flexible resources should compete in liberalized operation markets to ensure the reliability of the system at a minimum cost. This paper presents a new tool to assist industrial demand response to participate in operation markets and optimize its value. The tool uses a combined physical-mathematical modelling of the industrial demand response and a Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm specifically tuned for the proposed problem to maximize the profit. The main advantages of the proposed tool are demonstrated in the paper through its application to the participation of a meat factory in the Spanish tertiary reserve market during a whole year using a quarter-hourly time resolution. The enhanced performance of the proposed tool with respect to previous methodologies is shown with these four flexible processes examples, where the maximum available profit obtained in the simultaneous consideration of all different flexible processes is computed. The flexible processes are technical and economically characterized in a way that makes the tool valid for most of the processes in the industry.

[EN] A large number of metrics with which to assess the quality of cloud services have been proposed over the last years. However, this knowledge is still dispersed, and stakeholders have little or no guidance when choosing metrics that will be suitable to evaluate their cloud services. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to systematically identify, taxonomically classify, and compare existing quality of service (QoS) metrics in the cloud computing domain. We conducted a systematic literature review of 84 studies selected from a set of 4333 studies that were published from 2006 to November 2018. We specifically identified 470 metric operationalizations that were then classified using a taxonomy, which is also introduced in this paper. The data extracted from the metrics were subsequently analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicated that most metrics evaluate quality attributes related to performance efficiency (64%) and that there is a need for metrics that evaluate other characteristics, such as security and compatibility. The majority of the metrics are used during the Operation phase of the cloud services and are applied to the running service. Our results also revealed that metrics for cloud services are still in the early stages of maturity only 10% of the metrics had been empirically validated. The proposed taxonomy can be used by practitioners as a guideline when specifying service level objectives or deciding which metric is best suited to the evaluation of their cloud services, and by researchers as a comprehensive quality framework in which to evaluate their approaches.

[EN] Software developers require effective effort estimation models to facilitate project planning. Although Usman et al. systematically reviewed and synthesized the effort estimation models and practices for Agile Software Development (ASD) in 2014, new evidence may provide new perspectives for researchers and practitioners. This article presents a systematic literature review that updates the Usman et al. study from 2014 to 2020 by analyzing the data extracted from 73 new papers. This analysis allowed us to identify six agile methods: Scrum, Xtreme Programming and four others, in all of which expert-based estimation methods continue to play an important role. This is particularly the case of Planning Poker, which is very closely related to the most frequently used size metric (story points) and the way in which software requirements are specified in ASD. There is also a remarkable trend toward studying techniques based on the intensive use of data. In this respect, although most of the data originate from single-company datasets, there is a significant increase in the use of cross-company data. With regard to cost factors, we applied the thematic analysis method. The use of team and project factors appears to be more frequent than the consideration of more technical factors, in accordance with agile principles. Finally, although accuracy is still a challenge, we identified that improvements have been made. On the one hand, an increasing number of papers showed acceptable accuracy values, although many continued to report inadequate results. On the other, almost 29% of the papers that reported the accuracy metric used reflected aspects concerning the validation of the models and 18% reported the effect size when comparing models.

[EN] Although intelligent agent-based systems have existed for several years, the progression in terms of real applications or their integration in the industry have not yet reached the expected levels. During the last two decades, many agent platforms have appeared with the aim of simplifying the development of multi-agent systems. Some of these platforms have been designed for general purposes, while others have been oriented towards specific domains. However, the lack of standards and the complexity associated with supporting such systems, among other difficulties, have hampered their generalised use. This article looks in depth at the current situation of existing agent platforms, trying to analyse their current shortcomings and their expected needs in the near future. The goal of the paper is to identify possible lines of work and some of the most crucial aspects to be considered in order to popularize the application of agent technology as a dynamic and flexible solution to current problems. Moreover, the paper presents SPADE 3, a new version of the SPADE middleware, which has been totally redesigned in order to conform to the identified challenges. Finally, a case study is proposed to illustrate how SPADE 3 is able to fulfill these challenges.

[EN] This paper presents a multilayer frequency selective surface for a dual-polarized aperture array antenna in Ka-band. The elements of the array are cylindrical open cavities with a diameter of at 30 GHz, and spaced one wavelength. Due to this separation between elements, which is limiting and not reducible by the architecture of the feeding network and the size of the radiating element, grating lobes appear. Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS) can be a solution to this problem without modifying the feeder architecture nor the radiating elements. This paper presents the FSS design for reducing grating lobes level, the antenna assembly, and the experimental validation. The full antenna performance demonstrates that FSS operates in a range identical to the feeder (29.5 GHz to 31 GHz) with the added benefit of reducing the grating lobes level more than 10 dB for both polarizations.

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works., [EN] Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs) consist of groups of individuals (i.e., people) who may share common interests, preferences and needs in the context of temporal spatial proximity on roads. In this environment, the impact of human social factors, such as mobility, willingness to cooperate and personal preferences, on vehicular connectivity is taken under consideration, thus extending the concept of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In VSNs, vehicles are classified based on their social degree, a vehicle considered to be a ¿social¿ one if it accesses the vehicular social network and posts messages with a frequency higher than a given threshold. Therefore, to speed up the data dissemination process within a vehicular social network, a packet should be forwarded to those vehicles showing high social activity. In a previous paper, we introduced a new probabilistic-based broadcasting scheme called SCARF (SoCial-Aware Reliable Forwarding Technique for Vehicular Communications), and we analytically demonstrated its effectiveness in packet transmission reduction while guaranteeing network dissemination. In this paper, we assess SCARF in more realistic scenarios with real traffic traces, and we compare it with other similar techniques. We show that SCARF outperforms other approaches in terms of delivery ratio, while guaranteeing acceptable time delay values and average number of forwardings.

(c) 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] This paper presents a novel sensitive triple-band power rectifier for RF energy harvesting systems. The proposed rectifier can simultaneously harvest RF energy from GSM-900, GSM-1800, and Wi-Fi-2450 bands at relatively low and medium ambient power densities. Previously, a few multi-band rectennas have been reached a stable conversion efficiency overall frequency bands of interest because of the nonlinearity and the distinct input impedance of the rectifying circuit at these frequencies. The originality of this paper is on the improved impedance matching technique that enhances the efficiency and performance of the rectifier. The proposed high-efficiency triple-band rectifier consists of three parallel branches. Each branch comprises an input matching circuit designed to provide maximum RF power transferred to rectifying diodes, a single voltage doubler using Schottky diode HSMS-2852, and a DC-pass filter to smooth the DC output voltage. A prototype of the proposed rectifier circuit is fabricated and tested to verify its performance against the simulation results. With an optimum load resistance of 3.8 k at -10 dBm input power level, the measured RF to DC conversion efficiency achieves 33.7%, 21.8%, and 20% at 0.9, 1.8 and 2.45 GHz respectively. The efficiency is above 46.5 % overall bands of interest under 0 dBm input power

[EN] Integration of renewable energy sources require an increase in the flexibility of power systems. Demand response is a valuable flexible resource that is not currently being fully exploited. Small and medium industrial consumers can deliver a wide range of underused flexibility resources associated with the electricity consumption in their production processes. Flexible resources should compete in liberalized operation markets to ensure the reliability of the system at a minimum cost. This paper presents a new tool to assist industrial demand response to participate in operation markets and optimize its value. The tool uses a combined physical-mathematical modelling of the industrial demand response and a Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm specifically tuned for the proposed problem to maximize the profit. The main advantages of the proposed tool are demonstrated in the paper through its application to the participation of a meat factory in the Spanish tertiary reserve market during a whole year using a quarter-hourly time resolution. The enhanced performance of the proposed tool with respect to previous methodologies is shown with these four flexible processes examples, where the maximum available profit obtained in the simultaneous consideration of all different flexible processes is computed. The flexible processes are technical and economically characterized in a way that makes the tool valid for most of the processes in the industry.

[EN] A large number of metrics with which to assess the quality of cloud services have been proposed over the last years. However, this knowledge is still dispersed, and stakeholders have little or no guidance when choosing metrics that will be suitable to evaluate their cloud services. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to systematically identify, taxonomically classify, and compare existing quality of service (QoS) metrics in the cloud computing domain. We conducted a systematic literature review of 84 studies selected from a set of 4333 studies that were published from 2006 to November 2018. We specifically identified 470 metric operationalizations that were then classified using a taxonomy, which is also introduced in this paper. The data extracted from the metrics were subsequently analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings indicated that most metrics evaluate quality attributes related to performance efficiency (64%) and that there is a need for metrics that evaluate other characteristics, such as security and compatibility. The majority of the metrics are used during the Operation phase of the cloud services and are applied to the running service. Our results also revealed that metrics for cloud services are still in the early stages of maturity only 10% of the metrics had been empirically validated. The proposed taxonomy can be used by practitioners as a guideline when specifying service level objectives or deciding which metric is best suited to the evaluation of their cloud services, and by researchers as a comprehensive quality framework in which to evaluate their approaches.

[EN] This paper presents a multilayer frequency selective surface for a dual-polarized aperture array antenna in Ka-band. The elements of the array are cylindrical open cavities with a diameter of at 30 GHz, and spaced one wavelength. Due to this separation between elements, which is limiting and not reducible by the architecture of the feeding network and the size of the radiating element, grating lobes appear. Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS) can be a solution to this problem without modifying the feeder architecture nor the radiating elements. This paper presents the FSS design for reducing grating lobes level, the antenna assembly, and the experimental validation. The full antenna performance demonstrates that FSS operates in a range identical to the feeder (29.5 GHz to 31 GHz) with the added benefit of reducing the grating lobes level more than 10 dB for both polarizations.

[EN] Although intelligent agent-based systems have existed for several years, the progression in terms of real applications or their integration in the industry have not yet reached the expected levels. During the last two decades, many agent platforms have appeared with the aim of simplifying the development of multi-agent systems. Some of these platforms have been designed for general purposes, while others have been oriented towards specific domains. However, the lack of standards and the complexity associated with supporting such systems, among other difficulties, have hampered their generalised use. This article looks in depth at the current situation of existing agent platforms, trying to analyse their current shortcomings and their expected needs in the near future. The goal of the paper is to identify possible lines of work and some of the most crucial aspects to be considered in order to popularize the application of agent technology as a dynamic and flexible solution to current problems. Moreover, the paper presents SPADE 3, a new version of the SPADE middleware, which has been totally redesigned in order to conform to the identified challenges. Finally, a case study is proposed to illustrate how SPADE 3 is able to fulfill these challenges.

[EN] Software developers require effective effort estimation models to facilitate project planning. Although Usman et al. systematically reviewed and synthesized the effort estimation models and practices for Agile Software Development (ASD) in 2014, new evidence may provide new perspectives for researchers and practitioners. This article presents a systematic literature review that updates the Usman et al. study from 2014 to 2020 by analyzing the data extracted from 73 new papers. This analysis allowed us to identify six agile methods: Scrum, Xtreme Programming and four others, in all of which expert-based estimation methods continue to play an important role. This is particularly the case of Planning Poker, which is very closely related to the most frequently used size metric (story points) and the way in which software requirements are specified in ASD. There is also a remarkable trend toward studying techniques based on the intensive use of data. In this respect, although most of the data originate from single-company datasets, there is a significant increase in the use of cross-company data. With regard to cost factors, we applied the thematic analysis method. The use of team and project factors appears to be more frequent than the consideration of more technical factors, in accordance with agile principles. Finally, although accuracy is still a challenge, we identified that improvements have been made. On the one hand, an increasing number of papers showed acceptable accuracy values, although many continued to report inadequate results. On the other, almost 29% of the papers that reported the accuracy metric used reflected aspects concerning the validation of the models and 18% reported the effect size when comparing models.

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works., [EN] Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs) consist of groups of individuals (i.e., people) who may share common interests, preferences and needs in the context of temporal spatial proximity on roads. In this environment, the impact of human social factors, such as mobility, willingness to cooperate and personal preferences, on vehicular connectivity is taken under consideration, thus extending the concept of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In VSNs, vehicles are classified based on their social degree, a vehicle considered to be a ¿social¿ one if it accesses the vehicular social network and posts messages with a frequency higher than a given threshold. Therefore, to speed up the data dissemination process within a vehicular social network, a packet should be forwarded to those vehicles showing high social activity. In a previous paper, we introduced a new probabilistic-based broadcasting scheme called SCARF (SoCial-Aware Reliable Forwarding Technique for Vehicular Communications), and we analytically demonstrated its effectiveness in packet transmission reduction while guaranteeing network dissemination. In this paper, we assess SCARF in more realistic scenarios with real traffic traces, and we compare it with other similar techniques. We show that SCARF outperforms other approaches in terms of delivery ratio, while guaranteeing acceptable time delay values and average number of forwardings.

[EN] Smart contracts are programs that reside within decentralized blockchains and are executed pursuant to triggered instructions. A smart contract acts in a similar way to a traditional agreement but negates the necessity for the involvement of a third party. Smart contracts are capable of initiating their commands automatically, thus eliminating the involvement of a regulatory body. As a consequence of blockchain's immutable feature, smart contracts are developed in a manner that is distinct from traditional software. Once deployed to the blockchain, a smart contract cannot be modified or updated for security patches, thus encouraging developers to implement strong security strategies before deployment in order to avoid potential exploitation at a later time. However, the most recent dreadful attacks and the multifarious existing vulnerabilities which result as a consequence of the absence of security patches have challenged the sustainability of this technology. Attacks such as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) attack and the Parity Wallet hack have cost millions of dollars simply as a consequence of naïve bugs in the smart contract code. In this paper, we classify blockchain exploitation techniques into 4 categories based on the attack rationale; attacking consensus protocols, bugs in the smart contract, malware running in the operating system, and fraudulent users. We then focus on smart contract vulnerabilities, analyzing the 7 most important attack techniques to determine the real impact on smart contract technology. We reveal that even adopting the 10 most widely used tools to detect smart contract vulnerabilities, these still contain known vulnerabilities, providing a dangerously false sense of security. We conclude the paper with a discussion about recommendations and future research lines to progress towards a secure smart contract solution.

(c) 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] This paper presents a novel sensitive triple-band power rectifier for RF energy harvesting systems. The proposed rectifier can simultaneously harvest RF energy from GSM-900, GSM-1800, and Wi-Fi-2450 bands at relatively low and medium ambient power densities. Previously, a few multi-band rectennas have been reached a stable conversion efficiency overall frequency bands of interest because of the nonlinearity and the distinct input impedance of the rectifying circuit at these frequencies. The originality of this paper is on the improved impedance matching technique that enhances the efficiency and performance of the rectifier. The proposed high-efficiency triple-band rectifier consists of three parallel branches. Each branch comprises an input matching circuit designed to provide maximum RF power transferred to rectifying diodes, a single voltage doubler using Schottky diode HSMS-2852, and a DC-pass filter to smooth the DC output voltage. A prototype of the proposed rectifier circuit is fabricated and tested to verify its performance against the simulation results. With an optimum load resistance of 3.8 k at -10 dBm input power level, the measured RF to DC conversion efficiency achieves 33.7%, 21.8%, and 20% at 0.9, 1.8 and 2.45 GHz respectively. The efficiency is above 46.5 % overall bands of interest under 0 dBm input power

"© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.", [EN] To support the massive amount of memory accesses that GPGPU applications generate, GPU memory hierarchies are becoming more and more complex, and the Last Level Cache (LLC) size considerably increases each GPU generation. This paper shows that counter-intuitively, enlarging the LLC brings marginal performance gains in most applications. In other words, increasing the LLC size does not scale neither in performance nor energy consumption. We examine how LLC misses are managed in typical GPUs, and we find that in most cases the way LLC misses are managed are precisely the main performance limiter. This paper proposes a novel approach that addresses this shortcoming by leveraging a tiny additional Fetch and Replacement Cache-like structure (FRC) that stores control and coherence information of the incoming blocks until they are fetched from main memory. Then, the fetched blocks are swapped with the victim blocks (i.e., selected to be replaced) in the LLC, and the eviction of such victim blocks is performed from the FRC. This approach improves performance due to three main reasons: i) the lifetime of blocks being replaced is enlarged, ii) the main memory path is unclogged on long bursts of LLC misses, and iii) the average LLC miss latency is reduced. The proposal improves the LLC hit ratio, memory-level parallelism, and reduces the miss latency compared to much larger conventional caches. Moreover, this is achieved with reduced energy consumption and with much less area requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed FRC cache scales in performance with the number of GPU compute units and the LLC size, since, depending on the FRC size, performance improves ranging from 30 to 67 percent for a modern baseline GPU card, and from 32 to 118 percent for a larger GPU. In addition, energy consumption is reduced on average from 49 to 57 percent for the larger GPU. These benefits come with a small area increase (by 7.3 percent) over the LLC baseline.

(c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] The dielectric properties of biological tissues are of utmost importance in the development of wireless body area networks (WBANs), especially for implanted devices. The early design stages of medical devices like capsule endoscopy, pacemakers, or physiological sensors rely on precise knowledge of the dielectric properties of the tissues present in their surrounding medium. Many of these applications make use of electromagnetic phantoms, which are software or physical models that imitate the shape and the electromagnetic properties of the tissues. They are used for designing devices in software simulations and for testing them in laboratory trials, aiding in both the development of WBAN antennas or in communication link evaluations. The existing reports about dielectric in vivo properties are limited and have drawbacks like: low variety of characterized tissues, lacking some relevant ones, and limitations and inhomogeneity in the measured frequency range. This paper aims at filling that gap by providing a new database of dielectric properties of biological tissues measured in vivo . In particular, it is focused on the tissues of the thoracic and the abdominal regions, measured at the same wide frequency band, on the same animal specimen, and under the same conditions. The properties have been obtained by measuring porcine tissues in the 0.5¿26.5 GHz band with the open-ended coaxial technique. In this paper, we focus on those tissues that have been scarcely characterized so far in the literature, like heart, esophagus, stomach, and pancreas. The Cole¿Cole fitting parameters of the measured tissues and their uncertainties are provided.

[EN] In this paper, a novel mymargin soldering technique that improves the fabrication process of empty substrate integrated waveguide (ESIW) devices is presented. Up until now, in order to fabricate an ESIW device, the tin solder paste was distributed, before assembling, on the contact surface between layers, in order to ensure a good electrical contact. This process has a low degree of repeatability (random soldering thickness and distribution of tin) and reliability (a significant number of nonworking prototypes due to tin overflow). In this paper, we propose the mechanization of a set of plated vias just next to the metalized walls of the ESIW in the central layer. Next, in the top and bottom covers that close this ESIW, additional plated vias are drilled in the same position so that, when the device is assembled (using screws or rivets), metalized holes can be seen passing through the whole structure from top to bottom. These holes are then used as soldering vias that can guide the tin paste straight to the point where it is needed. When the paste is dried, soldered vias ensure a very good electrical contact between layers. In addition, the fluid tin fills any small gap that appears between layers, thus providing a very good electrical contact and mechanical union. This novel soldering technique has been validated with experimental results. Several prototypes of filters centered at 13 and 35 GHz have been fabricated, proving the repeatability and reliability of the proposed soldering technique.

(c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] In this paper, we propose a realistic model for simulating communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and ground vehicles, which can support mobile infrastructure to broadcast alerts in emergency situations. Three-dimensional positioning features should be considered in these simulations that involve UAVs and ground vehicles since communications links are not based on a flat surface. In fact, irregular terrains in the form of hills and mountains can greatly affect the communications by acting as obstacles that block radio signals partially or totally. Hence, in this paper, we propose a simulation model that conforms to this kind of communication and that was developed in the scope of the OMNeT++ simulator. The simulation results achieved showed a great degree of similarities with those results obtained in a real testbed for different scenarios. In addition, various path loss models and elevation models were considered to improve the level of realism of the simulation model.

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] Smart urban transportation management can be considered as a multifaceted big data challenge. It strongly relies on the information collected into multiple, widespread, and heterogeneous data sources as well as on the ability to extract actionable insights from them. Besides data, full stack (from platform to services and applications) Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions need to be specifically adopted to address smart cities challenges. Smart urban transportation management is one of the key use cases addressed in the context of the EUBra-BIGSEA (Europe-Brazil Collaboration of Big Data Scientific Research through Cloud-Centric Applications) project. This paper specifically focuses on the City Administration Dashboard, a public transport analytics application that has been developed on top of the EUBra-BIGSEA platform and used by the Municipality stakeholders of Curitiba, Brazil, to tackle urban traffic data analysis and planning challenges. The solution proposed in this paper joins together a scalable big and fast data analytics platform, a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure, data quality and entity matching algorithms as well as security and privacy techniques. By exploiting an interoperable programming framework based on Python Application Programming Interface (API), it allows an easy, rapid and transparent development of smart cities applications.

[EN] Currently, some medical devices such as the Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) are used for data transmission from inside to outside the body. Nevertheless, for certain applications such as WCE, the data rates offered by current medical frequency bands can result insufficient. Ultra Wideband (UWB) frequency band has become an interesting solution for this. However, to date, there is not a formal channel path loss model for the UWB frequency band in the gastrointestinal (GI) scenario due to the huge differences between the proposed studies. There are three main methodologies to characterize the propagation channel, software simulations and experimental measurements either in phantom or in in vivo animals. Previous works do not compare all the methodologies or present some disagreements with the literature. In this paper, a dedicated study of the path loss using the three methodologies aforementioned (simulations, phantoms and in vivo measurements) and a comparison with previous researches in the literature is performed. Moreover, numerical values for a path loss model which agrees with the three methodologies and the literature are proposed. This paper aims at being the starting point for a formal path loss model in the UWB frequency band for WBANs in the GI scenario

(c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] The dielectric properties of biological tissues are of utmost importance in the development of wireless body area networks (WBANs), especially for implanted devices. The early design stages of medical devices like capsule endoscopy, pacemakers, or physiological sensors rely on precise knowledge of the dielectric properties of the tissues present in their surrounding medium. Many of these applications make use of electromagnetic phantoms, which are software or physical models that imitate the shape and the electromagnetic properties of the tissues. They are used for designing devices in software simulations and for testing them in laboratory trials, aiding in both the development of WBAN antennas or in communication link evaluations. The existing reports about dielectric in vivo properties are limited and have drawbacks like: low variety of characterized tissues, lacking some relevant ones, and limitations and inhomogeneity in the measured frequency range. This paper aims at filling that gap by providing a new database of dielectric properties of biological tissues measured in vivo . In particular, it is focused on the tissues of the thoracic and the abdominal regions, measured at the same wide frequency band, on the same animal specimen, and under the same conditions. The properties have been obtained by measuring porcine tissues in the 0.5¿26.5 GHz band with the open-ended coaxial technique. In this paper, we focus on those tissues that have been scarcely characterized so far in the literature, like heart, esophagus, stomach, and pancreas. The Cole¿Cole fitting parameters of the measured tissues and their uncertainties are provided.

"© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.", [EN] To support the massive amount of memory accesses that GPGPU applications generate, GPU memory hierarchies are becoming more and more complex, and the Last Level Cache (LLC) size considerably increases each GPU generation. This paper shows that counter-intuitively, enlarging the LLC brings marginal performance gains in most applications. In other words, increasing the LLC size does not scale neither in performance nor energy consumption. We examine how LLC misses are managed in typical GPUs, and we find that in most cases the way LLC misses are managed are precisely the main performance limiter. This paper proposes a novel approach that addresses this shortcoming by leveraging a tiny additional Fetch and Replacement Cache-like structure (FRC) that stores control and coherence information of the incoming blocks until they are fetched from main memory. Then, the fetched blocks are swapped with the victim blocks (i.e., selected to be replaced) in the LLC, and the eviction of such victim blocks is performed from the FRC. This approach improves performance due to three main reasons: i) the lifetime of blocks being replaced is enlarged, ii) the main memory path is unclogged on long bursts of LLC misses, and iii) the average LLC miss latency is reduced. The proposal improves the LLC hit ratio, memory-level parallelism, and reduces the miss latency compared to much larger conventional caches. Moreover, this is achieved with reduced energy consumption and with much less area requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed FRC cache scales in performance with the number of GPU compute units and the LLC size, since, depending on the FRC size, performance improves ranging from 30 to 67 percent for a modern baseline GPU card, and from 32 to 118 percent for a larger GPU. In addition, energy consumption is reduced on average from 49 to 57 percent for the larger GPU. These benefits come with a small area increase (by 7.3 percent) over the LLC baseline.

[EN] In this paper, a novel mymargin soldering technique that improves the fabrication process of empty substrate integrated waveguide (ESIW) devices is presented. Up until now, in order to fabricate an ESIW device, the tin solder paste was distributed, before assembling, on the contact surface between layers, in order to ensure a good electrical contact. This process has a low degree of repeatability (random soldering thickness and distribution of tin) and reliability (a significant number of nonworking prototypes due to tin overflow). In this paper, we propose the mechanization of a set of plated vias just next to the metalized walls of the ESIW in the central layer. Next, in the top and bottom covers that close this ESIW, additional plated vias are drilled in the same position so that, when the device is assembled (using screws or rivets), metalized holes can be seen passing through the whole structure from top to bottom. These holes are then used as soldering vias that can guide the tin paste straight to the point where it is needed. When the paste is dried, soldered vias ensure a very good electrical contact between layers. In addition, the fluid tin fills any small gap that appears between layers, thus providing a very good electrical contact and mechanical union. This novel soldering technique has been validated with experimental results. Several prototypes of filters centered at 13 and 35 GHz have been fabricated, proving the repeatability and reliability of the proposed soldering technique.

"© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.", [EN] 3GPP LTE eMBMS release (Rel-) 14, also referred to as further evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (FeMBMS) or enhanced TV (EnTV), is the first mobile broadband technology standard to incorporate a transmission mode designed to deliver terrestrial broadcast services from conventional high power high tower (HPHT) broadcast infrastructure. With respect to the physical layer, the main improvements in FeMBMS are the support of larger inter-site distance for single frequency networks (SFNs) and the ability to allocate 100% of a carrier's resources to the broadcast payload, with self-contained signaling in the downlink. From the system architecture perspective, a receive-only mode enables free-to-air (FTA) reception with no need for an uplink or SIM card, thus receiving content without user equipment registration with a network. These functionalities are only available in the LTE advanced pro specifications as 5G new radio (NR), standardized in 3GPP from Rel-15, has so far focused entirely on unicast. This paper outlines a physical layer design for NR-MBMS, a system derived, with minor modifications, from the 5G-NR specifications, and suitable for the transmission of linear TV and radio services in either single-cell or SFN operation. This paper evaluates the NR-MBMS proposition and compares it to LTE-based FeMBMS in terms of flexibility, performance, capacity, and coverage.

(c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] In this paper, we propose a realistic model for simulating communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and ground vehicles, which can support mobile infrastructure to broadcast alerts in emergency situations. Three-dimensional positioning features should be considered in these simulations that involve UAVs and ground vehicles since communications links are not based on a flat surface. In fact, irregular terrains in the form of hills and mountains can greatly affect the communications by acting as obstacles that block radio signals partially or totally. Hence, in this paper, we propose a simulation model that conforms to this kind of communication and that was developed in the scope of the OMNeT++ simulator. The simulation results achieved showed a great degree of similarities with those results obtained in a real testbed for different scenarios. In addition, various path loss models and elevation models were considered to improve the level of realism of the simulation model.

"© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.", [EN] 3GPP LTE eMBMS release (Rel-) 14, also referred to as further evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (FeMBMS) or enhanced TV (EnTV), is the first mobile broadband technology standard to incorporate a transmission mode designed to deliver terrestrial broadcast services from conventional high power high tower (HPHT) broadcast infrastructure. With respect to the physical layer, the main improvements in FeMBMS are the support of larger inter-site distance for single frequency networks (SFNs) and the ability to allocate 100% of a carrier's resources to the broadcast payload, with self-contained signaling in the downlink. From the system architecture perspective, a receive-only mode enables free-to-air (FTA) reception with no need for an uplink or SIM card, thus receiving content without user equipment registration with a network. These functionalities are only available in the LTE advanced pro specifications as 5G new radio (NR), standardized in 3GPP from Rel-15, has so far focused entirely on unicast. This paper outlines a physical layer design for NR-MBMS, a system derived, with minor modifications, from the 5G-NR specifications, and suitable for the transmission of linear TV and radio services in either single-cell or SFN operation. This paper evaluates the NR-MBMS proposition and compares it to LTE-based FeMBMS in terms of flexibility, performance, capacity, and coverage.

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] Smart urban transportation management can be considered as a multifaceted big data challenge. It strongly relies on the information collected into multiple, widespread, and heterogeneous data sources as well as on the ability to extract actionable insights from them. Besides data, full stack (from platform to services and applications) Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions need to be specifically adopted to address smart cities challenges. Smart urban transportation management is one of the key use cases addressed in the context of the EUBra-BIGSEA (Europe-Brazil Collaboration of Big Data Scientific Research through Cloud-Centric Applications) project. This paper specifically focuses on the City Administration Dashboard, a public transport analytics application that has been developed on top of the EUBra-BIGSEA platform and used by the Municipality stakeholders of Curitiba, Brazil, to tackle urban traffic data analysis and planning challenges. The solution proposed in this paper joins together a scalable big and fast data analytics platform, a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure, data quality and entity matching algorithms as well as security and privacy techniques. By exploiting an interoperable programming framework based on Python Application Programming Interface (API), it allows an easy, rapid and transparent development of smart cities applications.

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works., [EN] Smart urban transportation management can be considered as a multifaceted big data challenge. It strongly relies on the information collected into multiple, widespread, and heterogeneous data sources as well as on the ability to extract actionable insights from them. Besides data, full stack (from platform to services and applications) Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions need to be specifically adopted to address smart cities challenges. Smart urban transportation management is one of the key use cases addressed in the context of the EUBra-BIGSEA (Europe-Brazil Collaboration of Big Data Scientific Research through Cloud-Centric Applications) project. This paper specifically focuses on the City Administration Dashboard, a public transport analytics application that has been developed on top of the EUBra-BIGSEA platform and used by the Municipality stakeholders of Curitiba, Brazil, to tackle urban traffic data analysis and planning challenges. The solution proposed in this paper joins together a scalable big and fast data analytics platform, a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure, data quality and entity matching algorithms as well as security and privacy techniques. By exploiting an interoperable programming framework based on Python Application Programming Interface (API), it allows an easy, rapid and transparent development of smart cities applications.

[EN] Currently, some medical devices such as the Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) are used for data transmission from inside to outside the body. Nevertheless, for certain applications such as WCE, the data rates offered by current medical frequency bands can result insufficient. Ultra Wideband (UWB) frequency band has become an interesting solution for this. However, to date, there is not a formal channel path loss model for the UWB frequency band in the gastrointestinal (GI) scenario due to the huge differences between the proposed studies. There are three main methodologies to characterize the propagation channel, software simulations and experimental measurements either in phantom or in in vivo animals. Previous works do not compare all the methodologies or present some disagreements with the literature. In this paper, a dedicated study of the path loss using the three methodologies aforementioned (simulations, phantoms and in vivo measurements) and a comparison with previous researches in the literature is performed. Moreover, numerical values for a path loss model which agrees with the three methodologies and the literature are proposed. This paper aims at being the starting point for a formal path loss model in the UWB frequency band for WBANs in the GI scenario

[EN] Currently, some medical devices such as the Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) are used for data transmission from inside to outside the body. Nevertheless, for certain applications such as WCE, the data rates offered by current medical frequency bands can result insufficient. Ultra Wideband (UWB) frequency band has become an interesting solution for this. However, to date, there is not a formal channel path loss model for the UWB frequency band in the gastrointestinal (GI) scenario due to the huge differences between the proposed studies. There are three main methodologies to characterize the propagation channel, software simulations and experimental measurements either in phantom or in in vivo animals. Previous works do not compare all the methodologies or present some disagreements with the literature. In this paper, a dedicated study of the path loss using the three methodologies aforementioned (simulations, phantoms and in vivo measurements) and a comparison with previous researches in the literature is performed. Moreover, numerical values for a path loss model which agrees with the three methodologies and the literature are proposed. This paper aims at being the starting point for a formal path loss model in the UWB frequency band for WBANs in the GI scenario

[EN] The connection of diode rectifier (DR) based wind power plants to existing or planned High Voltage dc (HVdc) interconnectors can lead to important savings on cost and system robustness. Since the DR station usually operates in a bipolar configuration, its connection to symmetric monopoles is particularly challenging. However, there are no published detailed studies on the protection of DR connection wind power plants to symmetric monopole interconnectors or even to bipolar interconnectors. This paper includes the comparative study of five different protection strategies for such systems, including both solid and resistive DR station grounding and strategies with and without the use of dc-circuit breakers. An analytical study allows for the calculation of fault current during fault on-set for both half-bridge and hybrid Modular Multi-level Converter (MMC) stations. Using detailed Electromagnetic Transient (EMT) simulation studies, the different protection strategies are evaluated in terms of current, voltage and isolation requirements of each element, as well as the need for dc-circuit breakers, fast communication or larger surge arresters. Moreover, a distance fault detection algorithm is included for the wind turbine converters to distinguish between local ac-grid and dc-cable faults. From the simulation results it is possible to conclude that DR high impedance grounding, together with wind turbine distance protection can be used for the protection of DR based off-shore wind power plants connected to symmetric monopole interconnectors without requiring dc-circuit breakers.

[EN] In heavy-duty vehicles, multiple signals are available to estimate the vehicle's kinematics, such as Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Global Positioning System (GPS) and linear and angular speed readings from wheel tachometers on the internal Controller Area Network (CAN). These signals have different noise variance, bandwidth and sampling rate (being the latter, possibly, irregular). In this paper we present a non-linear sensor fusion algorithm allowing asynchronous sampling and non-causal smoothing. It is applied to achieve accuracy improvements when incorporating odometry measurements from CAN bus to standard GPS+IMU kinematic estimation, as well as the robustness against missing data. Our results show that this asynchronous multi-sensor (GPS+IMU+CAN-based odometry) fusion is advantageous in low-speed manoeuvres, improving accuracy and robustness to missing data, thanks to non-causal filtering. The proposed algorithm is based on Extended Kalman Filter and Smoother, with exponential discretization of continuous-time stochastic differential equations, in order to process measurements at arbitrary time instants; it can provide data to subsequent processing steps at arbitrary time instants, not necessarily coincident with the original measurement ones. Given the extra information available in the smoothing case, its estimation performance is less sensitive to the noise-variance parameter setting, compared to causal filtering. Working Matlab code is provided at the end of this work.

[EN] The remote location of agricultural fields leads to the difficulty of deploying Precision Agriculture (PA) systems as there is no Internet access in those areas. Therefore, the use of long-range wireless technologies such as LoRa can provide connectivity to rural areas and allow monitoring PA systems remotely. In this paper, a heterogeneous architecture and protocol that allows communication with both WiFi and LoRa, including multiple hops in LoRa are presented. The design is based on a tree topology comprised of electronic devices deployed on different areas of interest for PA systems such as the canals of irrigation water, the fields, and the urban areas that generate wastewater. A set of practical tests with different configurations have been performed to determine the correct operation of the proposed protocol. The results show that the consumed bandwidth for both 433 MHz and 868 MHz frequency bands remained within the limits for the most restrictive LoRa configurations. Therefore, different deployment needs can be addressed with the implementation of this proposal. Furthermore, the use of packet transmission delays of 500 ms at the CH node results in high successful packet delivery rates.

[EN] Recent standardization of portions of the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band for fifth-generation (5G) operation has called for further research on how short-term fading behaves in that unexplored part of the spectrum. With such a target, this paper reports on a thorough measurement campaign conducted in an indoor environment characterized by rich-multipath scattering, a part of a modern building, with floor and ceiling constructed of reinforced concrete over steel plates with wood and plasterboard-paneled walls. Particularly, measurements have been performed in a variety of scenarios, under line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-ofsight (nLoS) conditions, for a wide range of frequencies, namely from 25 to 40 GHz - a span of 15 GHz - therefore, including 26, 28 and 39 GHz. First and second order statistics of representative fading models, namely Rayleigh, Rice, Nakagami, folded normal, alpha-mu, eta-mu, kappa-mu and alpha-eta-kappa-mu have been investigated. The metrics used in the analysis were the normalized mean square error (NMSE), the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS), and the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Additionally, the study of the kappa-mu. model is advanced, in which new, exact, simple closed-form expressions for probability density function, cumulative distribution function, and level crossing rate are derived for some particular cases, namely for mu = n + 1/2 in which n is an element of N.

[EN] Intelligent control of public lighting is nowadays one of the most challenging issues in smart city deployment. Lighting optimization entails a compromise between comfort, safety, and power consumption, affecting both vehicles and pedestrians. Smart solutions must estimate their characteristics to trade-off users' needs and energy requirements. This paper proposes an intelligent street lighting control system and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve method to evaluate the best number of street lamps to achieve a balance between public road user comfort and system power consumption. The control system is based on the detection of users, mainly pedestrians, using presence sensors. From the detection of a pedestrian by two or more consecutive street lamps it is possible to determine their speed. Knowing the pedestrian speed, allows the system to anticipate and adjust the light intensity of the remaining street lamps, and provide a comfortable view of the street. Using the ROC curve, we evaluate the control algorithm in terms of the number of previous street lamps used. We have tested the system and the method in a model of pedestrians walking down a street. The obtained results show that ROC analysis used to control street lighting allows measuring the whole control system's efficiency by providing a concrete number of previous street lamps.

[EN] Cloud computing is being adopted by commercial and governmental organizations driven by the need to reduce the operational cost of their information technology resources and search for a scalable and flexible way to provide and release their software services. In this computing model, the Quality of Services (QoS) is agreed between service providers and their customers through Service Level Agreements (SLA). There is thus a need for systematic approaches with which to assess the quality of cloud services and their compliance with the SLA. In previous work, we introduced a generic method for Monitoring cloud Services using models at RunTime (MoS@RT), which allows the monitoring requirements or the metric operationalizations of these requirements to be changed at runtime without the modification of the underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we present the design of a monitoring infrastructure that supports the proposed method with its instantiation to a specific platform and reports the results of an experiment carried out to evaluate the perceived efficacy of 58 undergraduate students when using the infrastructure to configure the monitoring of cloud services deployed on the Microsoft Azure platform. The results show that the participants perceived MoS@RT to be easy to use, useful, and they also expressed their intention to use the method in the future. Although further experiments must be carried out to strengthen these results, MoS@RT has proved to be a promising monitoring method for cloud services.

[EN] In this paper a novel tuning procedure for Two-Degree-of-Freedom (2-DOF) PID controllers is proposed. The tuning methodology is based on an Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator. As a result, an equivalent 2-DOF PID controller with simpler tuning rules is obtained. One advantage of the proposed method is that tracking performance and disturbance rejection can be accommodated separately in control synthesis. Moreover, the trade-off between disturbance rejection and robustness can easily be adjusted by tuning a single parameter without affecting the desired set-point tracking specifications. Numerical comparisons with well-known tuning methods are performed to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposal is experimentally validated in an open-loop unstable plant consisting of a test-bed quadrotor platform.

[EN] We are witnessing an increasing need to accurately measure people's mobility as it has become an instrumental factor for the development of innovative services in multiple domains. In this context, several ICT solutions have relied on location-based technologies such as GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth to track individual's movements. However, these technologies are limited by the privacy restrictions of data providers. In this paper we propose a methodology to robustly predict citizens' mobility patterns based on heterogeneous data from different sources. Particularly, our methodology focuses on a human mobility predictor based on a low-resolution mobility dataset and the use of water consumption data as a facilitator of this prediction task. As a result, this work explores whether the water consumption within a geographical region can reveal human activity patterns relevant from the point of view of the mobility mining discipline. This approach has been tested in a residential area near Madrid (Spain) obtaining quite promising results.

[EN] The growing use of mobile nodes in manufacturing environments is increasing the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the communications infrastructures that support them, as is the case with Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN). Managing networks using Software Defined Networks (SDN) addresses the challenge of handling multiple sources in a satisfactory manner. The global vision of the topology that the SDN controller has allows a logical segmentation of the network, through the allocation of dedicated resources for each information flow, thus ensuring independent service levels and complete isolation. Mobile nodes produce constant changes in topology, which lead to instability for routing protocols. Traditional routing solutions with protocols such as Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) require additional time to make the parent node change. This paper proposes Mobile Multicast Forwarding with Software Defined Network (MMF-SDN), an approach using Software Defined Networking solution for WIreless SEnsor Network (SDN WISE) protocol that exploits the advantages of SDN and Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) synchronism. The mobile nodes are managed as multicast sources, through a cumulative allocation of resources from the controller. This allows reception states to be synchronized at the parent nodes to provide network stability, avoiding subsequent recalculations in the routing protocol. Parent node changes are transparent and immediate. This proposal improves on other SDN based solutions, reducing energy consumption in reception by up to 50%, 70% end-to-end delay and improving scalability with a 30% reduction in slotframe occupancy.

[EN] The remote location of agricultural fields leads to the difficulty of deploying Precision Agriculture (PA) systems as there is no Internet access in those areas. Therefore, the use of long-range wireless technologies such as LoRa can provide connectivity to rural areas and allow monitoring PA systems remotely. In this paper, a heterogeneous architecture and protocol that allows communication with both WiFi and LoRa, including multiple hops in LoRa are presented. The design is based on a tree topology comprised of electronic devices deployed on different areas of interest for PA systems such as the canals of irrigation water, the fields, and the urban areas that generate wastewater. A set of practical tests with different configurations have been performed to determine the correct operation of the proposed protocol. The results show that the consumed bandwidth for both 433 MHz and 868 MHz frequency bands remained within the limits for the most restrictive LoRa configurations. Therefore, different deployment needs can be addressed with the implementation of this proposal. Furthermore, the use of packet transmission delays of 500 ms at the CH node results in high successful packet delivery rates.

[EN] Recent standardization of portions of the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band for fifth-generation (5G) operation has called for further research on how short-term fading behaves in that unexplored part of the spectrum. With such a target, this paper reports on a thorough measurement campaign conducted in an indoor environment characterized by rich-multipath scattering, a part of a modern building, with floor and ceiling constructed of reinforced concrete over steel plates with wood and plasterboard-paneled walls. Particularly, measurements have been performed in a variety of scenarios, under line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-ofsight (nLoS) conditions, for a wide range of frequencies, namely from 25 to 40 GHz - a span of 15 GHz - therefore, including 26, 28 and 39 GHz. First and second order statistics of representative fading models, namely Rayleigh, Rice, Nakagami, folded normal, alpha-mu, eta-mu, kappa-mu and alpha-eta-kappa-mu have been investigated. The metrics used in the analysis were the normalized mean square error (NMSE), the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS), and the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Additionally, the study of the kappa-mu. model is advanced, in which new, exact, simple closed-form expressions for probability density function, cumulative distribution function, and level crossing rate are derived for some particular cases, namely for mu = n + 1/2 in which n is an element of N.

[EN] In this paper a novel tuning procedure for Two-Degree-of-Freedom (2-DOF) PID controllers is proposed. The tuning methodology is based on an Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator. As a result, an equivalent 2-DOF PID controller with simpler tuning rules is obtained. One advantage of the proposed method is that tracking performance and disturbance rejection can be accommodated separately in control synthesis. Moreover, the trade-off between disturbance rejection and robustness can easily be adjusted by tuning a single parameter without affecting the desired set-point tracking specifications. Numerical comparisons with well-known tuning methods are performed to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposal is experimentally validated in an open-loop unstable plant consisting of a test-bed quadrotor platform.

[EN] In heavy-duty vehicles, multiple signals are available to estimate the vehicle's kinematics, such as Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), Global Positioning System (GPS) and linear and angular speed readings from wheel tachometers on the internal Controller Area Network (CAN). These signals have different noise variance, bandwidth and sampling rate (being the latter, possibly, irregular). In this paper we present a non-linear sensor fusion algorithm allowing asynchronous sampling and non-causal smoothing. It is applied to achieve accuracy improvements when incorporating odometry measurements from CAN bus to standard GPS+IMU kinematic estimation, as well as the robustness against missing data. Our results show that this asynchronous multi-sensor (GPS+IMU+CAN-based odometry) fusion is advantageous in low-speed manoeuvres, improving accuracy and robustness to missing data, thanks to non-causal filtering. The proposed algorithm is based on Extended Kalman Filter and Smoother, with exponential discretization of continuous-time stochastic differential equations, in order to process measurements at arbitrary time instants; it can provide data to subsequent processing steps at arbitrary time instants, not necessarily coincident with the original measurement ones. Given the extra information available in the smoothing case, its estimation performance is less sensitive to the noise-variance parameter setting, compared to causal filtering. Working Matlab code is provided at the end of this work.

[EN] The growing use of mobile nodes in manufacturing environments is increasing the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the communications infrastructures that support them, as is the case with Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN). Managing networks using Software Defined Networks (SDN) addresses the challenge of handling multiple sources in a satisfactory manner. The global vision of the topology that the SDN controller has allows a logical segmentation of the network, through the allocation of dedicated resources for each information flow, thus ensuring independent service levels and complete isolation. Mobile nodes produce constant changes in topology, which lead to instability for routing protocols. Traditional routing solutions with protocols such as Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) require additional time to make the parent node change. This paper proposes Mobile Multicast Forwarding with Software Defined Network (MMF-SDN), an approach using Software Defined Networking solution for WIreless SEnsor Network (SDN WISE) protocol that exploits the advantages of SDN and Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) synchronism. The mobile nodes are managed as multicast sources, through a cumulative allocation of resources from the controller. This allows reception states to be synchronized at the parent nodes to provide network stability, avoiding subsequent recalculations in the routing protocol. Parent node changes are transparent and immediate. This proposal improves on other SDN based solutions, reducing energy consumption in reception by up to 50%, 70% end-to-end delay and improving scalability with a 30% reduction in slotframe occupancy.

[EN] We are witnessing an increasing need to accurately measure people's mobility as it has become an instrumental factor for the development of innovative services in multiple domains. In this context, several ICT solutions have relied on location-based technologies such as GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth to track individual's movements. However, these technologies are limited by the privacy restrictions of data providers. In this paper we propose a methodology to robustly predict citizens' mobility patterns based on heterogeneous data from different sources. Particularly, our methodology focuses on a human mobility predictor based on a low-resolution mobility dataset and the use of water consumption data as a facilitator of this prediction task. As a result, this work explores whether the water consumption within a geographical region can reveal human activity patterns relevant from the point of view of the mobility mining discipline. This approach has been tested in a residential area near Madrid (Spain) obtaining quite promising results.