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The role of wireless communications in guaranteeing safe and resource-efficient intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is of great significance. With the advent of a new technological epoch in cellular network development, various novel technical solutions are being considered as key enablers for future 5G-beyond and 6G networks. In this position paper, we identify and discuss three key pillars in the wireless network evolution that we suppose to be the foundation for the practical deployment of mass ITS. We first show how edge-located solutions may help in data delivery, next we present the role of the integrated communications and sensing paradigm (ICAS) in vehicular communications, and finally, we concentrate on advances in cellular-based sidelink communications.

One of the main risk factors which affect the archaeological heritage is the looting which causes the destruction of stratigraphic data and the 'cultural context' that are lost forever and cannot be restored any more. The use of appropriate technologies, including Earth Observation (EO), for the identification of sites exposed to the destructive action of grave robbers, the timely detection and quantification of the extension of the looted areas is a mandatory step for setting effective in situ monitoring strategies in particular for remote and inaccessible archaeological areas. In this paper a remote and close range sensing based approach, including satellite and UAS based image processing, and GPR, has been applied to the Inca settlement of Paredones, in desert environment in Southern Peru, for the detection of looting features. The approach includes also the use of an automatic algorithm named ALFEA (Archaeological Looting Feature Extraction Approach), developed and already experienced by the same authors for other desert sites in South, Central and North of Peru. ALFEA is based on the integration of spatial autocorrelation statistics, unsupervised classification and segmentation. To improve the capability in discriminating and extracting looting features a segmentation step including the setup of multi threshold parameters has been added (ALFEA-I method). Close range analyses based on UAS have been performed with the twofold aims: i) to validate, along with in situ surveys, ALFEA-I method, thus evidencing a good rate of success; ii) to analyze the morphological characteristics of looting features, useful to understand the technique and the depth of digging. With this latter respect complementary information have been provided by also GPR prospecting.

Connectivity and automation are increasingly getting importance in the automotive industry, which is observing a radical change from vehicles driven by humans to fully automated and remotely controlled ones. The test and validation of all the related devices and applications is thus becoming a crucial aspect; this is raising the interest on hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) platforms which reduce the need for complicated field trials, thus limiting the costs and delay added to the process. With reference to the test and validation of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications aspects, and assuming either sidelink LTE/5GV2X or IEEE 802.11p/bd technologies, in this work we focus on the real-time HiL simulation of the information exchanged by one vehicle under test and the surrounding, simulated, objects. Such exchange must be reproduced in a time-efficient manner, with elaborations done fast enough to allow testing the applications in real-time. More precisely, we discuss the simulation of nonideal positioning and channel propagation taking into account current impairments. We also provide details on optimization solutions that allowed us to trade-off minor loss in accuracy with a significant reduction of the computation time burden, reaching up to more than one order of magnitude speed increase in our experiments., The 2021 IEEE 93rd Vehicular Technology Conference: VTC2021-Spring

Vehicles are increasingly becoming connected and short-range wireless communications promise to introduce a radical change in the drivers' behaviors. Among the main use cases, the intersection management is surely one of those that could mostly impact on both traffic safety and efficiency. In this work, we consider an intersection collision warning application and exploit an hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform to verify the impact on the risk of accidents as well as the average time to travel a given distance. Besides including real ITS-G5 compliant message exchanges, the platform also includes a channel emulator with real signals. Results show that the risk of collisions can be drastically reduced, with an overall trade-off between safety and traffic efficiency. At the same time, it is shown that the presence of real channel conditions cannot guarantee the same condition of zero-risk as with ideal channel propagation, remarking the importance of channel conditions and signal processing.

The application of high-resolution MEMS strain sensors based on micromechanical resonators fabricated with wafer-level vacuum packaging to the construction of large dynamic range weighing systems is explored. Resonant sensors with sub-nano strain resolution are adopted to build a load cell prototype using a standard aluminum structure normally utilized in commercial weighing systems. A differential strain measurement configuration is implemented with two sensors oriented at 90° between them and fabricated on the same chip for temperature compensation. The load cell equipped with the resonant MEMS sensors shows an excellent dynamic range of 108 dB, effective temperature compensation and good weight measurement reproducibility.

A new strain sensor design based on vacuum packaged Double-Ended Tuning Fork silicon resonators with a strain amplification mechanism is presented. The sensors are fabricated with a Silicon On Insulator MEMS process including a thin-film vacuum encapsulation technology that permits to obtain high-Q resonators operating at a vacuum level around 160 mTorr. Within the encapsulation, a strain amplification structure consisting in a long beam connected to the DETF resonator is integrated in order to increase the sensitivity of the device to the applied strain. Thanks to such amplification, an unprecedented sensitivity of $200 \text{Hz}/\mu\varepsilon$ in bending tests on steel is demonstrated, operating the sensors in closed loop with an external readout circuit.

Vehicles will be equipped with short-range wireless technologies with the aim to improve safety and traffic efficiency. Novel applications are thus being implemented for future cars and trucks, and one of the main issues is how to conduct tests and optimizations in an effective way, limiting the need to perform costly and time consuming experiments on the road. To cope with this issue, we have implemented a simulator with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), called TRUDI, where the hardware and the implemented applications are tested in the laboratory by injecting virtual positions of the vehicles with the support of a traffic simulator. TRUDI acts as a man-in-the-middle between the communication module and the application itself, making it possible to perform tests with the real devices and providing as an output a system ready for the road. Using TRUDI, it is possible to check the application with a few vehicles and real wireless devices or many vehicles using simulated communication components before moving to experiments on the road. As an example use case, an application for the intersection management is presented, where the driver is warned of the presence and speed of other vehicles approaching the same junction.

The paper investigates the transmission characteristics of a low power device, named micro.sp©, patented by STE Industries, to be used for Internet of Things (IoT) applications where battery duration is a critical aspect and the transmitted information is organized in messages composed by a limited number of bits. The technical characteristics of micro. $\text{sp}^{\bigcirc\!\!\!\!\!\text{C}}$ are compared with those of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices, which appears as the main competing short range wireless technology. Experimental results show that micro $\text{sp}^{\bigcirc\!\!\!\!\!\text{C}}$ can be considered an enabling technology for the implementation of very low consumption short-range devices (according to ETSI definition). To give some examples, measurements have revealed that assuming to transmit few bytes every 30 seconds, a micro.sp© device can work for more than 30 years with the same coin battery, more than double the time of the BLE devices.

Satellite communication has the potential to provide coverage over large geographical areas. This ubiquity enables potential for providing connectivity for currently unserved remote areas as well as for moving platforms such as airplanes and ships. However, many satellite systems were developed on private networks, each having their individual solution for the satellite systems and for the end user equipment (UE). In order to extent the satellite-industry-wide standards to global telecommunication standards, there are currently activities in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) to study the feasibility and needed standard adaptations for the 5th generation (5G) new radio (NR) 3GPP standard. In this paper, we provide an overview of the ongoing activity in 3GPP RAN working groups with focus on RAN2 and RAN3 aspects for enabling NR communication over geosynchronous orbit (GEO) and non-GEO satellite systems.

A novel Micro-Opto-Mechanical acoustic sensor that can be utilized to measure the width of surface opening cracks in concrete structures from aerial robots is presented. The sensor is used in combination with a piezoelectric emitter operating at 54 kHz in a crack width measurement procedure that provides a resolution around 0.2 mm. The method is tolerant to pressure variations during contact with concrete, which may easily occur when operating the sensors from aerial robots.

Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication devices are available, disadvantaged battlefield connectivity currently prevents full exploitation of the potentially available information. An infrastructure for adaptive information processing and distribution may improve this situation by providing advanced and autonomous orchestration mechanisms for real-time data exchange and service execution. This paper provides an overview of the work being done on this topic within the NATO IST-168 RTG: its ambition, architectural approach and status. © 2019 IEEE.

Direct connectivity between vehicles will let a variety of new applications become a reality, from safety to traffic management and infotainment. Different wireless access technologies can enable this kind of connections, from mobile-fi IEEE 802.11p in the US and ETSI G5 in Europe, to the more recent 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. To integrate the capabilities and performance of these radio access technologies, light emitting diodes (LEDs) operating in the front and rear vehicles' lights, can introduce a further degree of connectivity through the so called visible light communication (VLC), by setting up direct links between vehicles in visibility and between vehicles and the road side (such as traffic lights and variable message panels). This paper investigates the performance of vehicular visible light networks (VVLNs) in terms of message delivery rate when full-duplex (FD) capabilities are exploited. Specifically, instead of considering carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) as foreseen by the IEEE 802.15.7 standard for VLC, we here propose a CSMA with collision detection (CSMA/CD) protocol exploiting the reverse link made available by the concurrent use of LEDs as transmitters and photodiodes as receivers for an immediate feedback during decoding. Results show an increase of up to 10% in the delivered data thanks to FD in realistic urban scenarios and give guidelines to network designers.

For automotive safety applications, vehicles directly exchange periodic beacons that contain status information such as position, speed, acceleration, etc., and the application layer issues warnings if a hazardous situation is detected. The update rate of these beacons should be high enough to allow the application to swiftly react to prevent accidents and current recommendations provide fixed values for different safety use cases. This approach is sub-optimal since wireless resources might be used when not necessary, e.g., when cars are queuing at a traffic light, and the proposals made for variable beacon periodicity (BP) typically do not take into account the safety aspect or are strictly related to the access technology in use. This paper presents a new algorithm called beaconing adaptation for safety enhancement (BASE) that adapts the BP to minimize the amount of radio resources used by the safety application without breaching safety requirements. BASE is access technology agnostic and focuses on common traffic and traveling conditions (not on particular crossroads, overtaking, etc.), and the results presented in this paper show how it allows for substantial capacity gains in a highway collision-avoidance scenario.

Cooperative awareness, consisting in the periodic broadcasting of messages, called beacons, to inform neighboring vehicles about maneuvers, changes of direction and other relevant mobility information, represents the core requirement to enable applications that may increase road safety and transportation efficiency. Up to few months ago, when latest 3GPP Release added to long term evolution (LTE) the support of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, the only suitable standard was IEEE 802.11p in the U.S. and the corresponding ITS-G5 in Europe. The choice regarding the worldwide adoption of one of the two technologies is still under discussion, since both show advantages and drawbacks. In this work, we analyze IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V2V and evaluate their performance for the cooperative awareness service through simulations in a realistic highway scenario. Both in-coverage and out-of-coverage conditions are considered for LTE-V2V. Results reveal that LTE-V2V in-coverage is the best solution in terms of packet reception ratio for all the considered values of beacon size and communication range. As far as the beacon update delay is concerned, we observe that LTE-V2V in-coverage still provides the best performance when small packets are transmitted, while IEEE 802.11p gives the best results for values of the communication range higher than 100 m when the packet size is increased.

In a near future, vehicles will be equipped with wireless communications technologies to periodically broadcast information to their neighbors on their position and speed. The messages carrying such information, normally denoted as beacons, will reduce the probability of accidents and improve the safety of drivers and passengers. The main candidate technologies for this scope today are IEEE 802.11p and LTE-Advanced with device-to-device communications (LTE-D2D), which is now evolving into vehicle-to-vehicle communications features (LTE- V2V). The aim of this paper is thus to compare the performance in terms of scalability of these two technologies when used for beacon transmission. The comparison is made analytically, through the definition of common scenario and metrics.

This paper covers a silicon photonics technology platform that leverages a commercial semiconductor supply chain for the manufacturing of high performance optical transceivers for high performance computing and hyper-scale data-center applications.

In this paper we discuss the different aspects of designing and manufacturing advanced silicon photonics transceivers and focus on utilizing the experience and infrastructure from the CMOS industry. As an example, we discuss the implementation of a 100G CWDM-2 transceiver.

Integrating different radio access technologies (RATs) is one effective method to meet the demand to provide ever increasing data rates to the users. For integrating LTE and WLAN in particular, the purpose is to enhance the operators control of when the UE uses WLAN. Another aim, in addition to better network control on which RAT is used, is the possible data aggregation which enables simultaneous utilization of both resources. In this paper, we present LTE-WLAN Aggregation (LWA) as specified in 3GPP and compare it to the LTE-WLAN Radio Level Integration with IPsec tunnel (LWIP), also specified in 3GPP. In addition, we provide simulation results comparing the schemes in an example scenario.

Three Ge-on-Si photodetector architectures with different contacting schemes are compared, with emphasis on their bandwidth. The study shows that bandwidth > 50 GHz and responsivity > 1 A/W at 1490 nm can be achieved using a commercial silicon photonics process.