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We demonstrate the gain brought by adaptive optics for space-ground QKD links. Refined modeling of turbulence, adaptive optics and QKD ,including finite-size effects, shows improvement by several orders of magnitude of the secret key rate.

To support the provisioning of modern services in a smart city environment, future communication networks need to be intelligently designed with respect to the city infrastructure and energy efficient utilization of resources. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are already being utilized as part of a smart city wireless network infrastructure to provide on-demand connectivity and eliminate the network’s coverage holes, especially when communication conditions are unfavorable. Complementary to this, the adoption of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) technology allows for the creation of a more controllable smart wireless communications environment. In this article, a multi-user Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) communications system aided by a RIS and a UAV is studied. Based on a single-leader multiple-followers Stackelberg Game, we aim to jointly optimize the overall received signal strength at the UAV and maximize the users’ achieved energy efficiency. The UAV – acting as a leader - intelligently steers the RIS-reflected signals in order to enhance the corresponding received signal quality, by determining the RIS elements’ effective phase shifts. This, in turn, is exploited by the users (i.e., followers), which through the formulation of a non-cooperative game, where each user aims at maximizing its achieved energy efficiency, they determine their optimal uplink transmission power. The proposed optimization framework is evaluated via modeling and simulation, demonstrating the significant power savings and the ultimate users’ satisfaction occurring by the introduction of the RIS.

The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communications together with software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are expected to enable a wide range of vertical use-cases. Different vertical industries with diverse service streams and sets of requirements should leverage the advanced capabilities of 5G networks through a single infrastructure to support the desired Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/QoE). In this paper, we focus on the Transport vertical and we study four novel service categories, each one consisting of one or more related scenarios, within the framework of the 5G Health, Aquaculture and Transport (5G-HEART) 5G PPP Phase 3 project. The first pass analysis of the envisioned vehicular services and their underlying operation, combined with the mapping of the mostly high-level functional user requirements to quantitative network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via a thorough and concise methodology, is essential for future testing with real pilots. Furthermore, our work paves the way towards efficient network slicing by exploring the interrelations between the identified KPIs and the respective target values that must be simultaneously satisfied over the same physical network infrastructure, in the context of the three 5G generic services.

The emergence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as part of the safety-critical and traffic alleviation infrastructure in 5G and beyond wireless networks, promotes the rethinking of the conventional resource orchestration management. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that treats the uplink power allocation problem in UAV-assisted wireless networks, operated under Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), based on the principles of labor economics and Contract Theory (CT). The proposed approach specifically targets the challenge of imperfect Channel State Information (CSI) due to the uncertainties of the wireless links. The users are characterized by types that depend on their experienced channel conditions, which are typically unknown to the UAVs, while the latter probabilistically estimate the users’ types. The users’ transmission powers are iteratively optimized and determined, while an Reinforcement Learning (RL)-empowered user-to-UAV association procedure is realized. The overall framework is evaluated via modeling and simulation regarding its proper operation, effectiveness and efficiency, under different scenarios.

This paper describes an innovative approach to radio channel characterization in UMTS and LTE mobile networks. In place of traditional drive tests (DT), which employ a single test mobile, a massive collection of georeferenced radio measurements is made from a wide population of user equipment (UE). This is possible with new 3GPP features, called “minimization of DTs” (MDT), which are implemented in the last generation UEs and enable the reporting of additional periodical measurements, including GPS position and estimated UE distance (i.e. delay) over the radio path. This opens to new fields of investigation in the mobile radio channel, unreachable with the legacy DT approach, such as multipath and Doppler analysis. The UE MDT data of UMTS and LTE RAN of Telecom Italia Mobile, in the Italian midsized city of Bologna, have been statistically analyzed. The big data elaboration has been performed with the Nokia proprietary system “GeoSynthesis.” The results give a high-resolution geographical view of the above-mentioned channel phenomena affecting the quality and user experience. They are in good accordance with network performance indicators: the higher the multipath time, the worse the decoding performance of radio blocks (block error rate). The estimated Doppler shift also fits the known mobility patterns in the urban environment.

We discuss the current landscape in quantum communication and cryptography, and focus in particular on recent photonic implementations, using encoding in discrete or continuous properties of light, of central quantum network protocols, enabling secret key distribution, verification of entangled resources and transactions of quantum money, with maximal security guarantees. We also describe current challenges in this field and our efforts towards the miniaturization of the developed photonic systems, their integration into telecommunication network infrastructures, including with satellite links, as well as the practical demonstration of novel protocols featuring a quantum advantage in communication efficiency for a wide range of useful tasks in a network environment. These advances enrich the resources and applications of the emerging quantum networks that will play a central role in the context of future quantum-safe communications.

A new paradigm for the analysis of radio coverage and quality of live 4G cellular radio access network (RAN) is reported. The 3GPP standard feature called minimization of drive test (MDT), is used to collect GPS coordinates together with radio measurements of large population of user equipment (UE) i.e., the smartphones. MDT does not require any additional software or App in the UE, it enable UE to report additional periodical measurements throughout signaling phase i.e., without any impact on customer costs. MDT data of Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) RAN have been collected and statistically analyzed, from anonymous UEs. The analysis has been focused on the city of Ancona (Italy) where MDT allowed to deeply study an electromagnetic interference issue on LTE RAN in the port area of the city. MDT results have been overlapped to theoretical electromagnetic simulation of radio coverage and comparison have been discussed. MDT feature allows the GPS accuracy to the geospatial analysis of radio measurements thus offering a new perspective in cellular planning and radio network optimization. MDT data has been collected using Geosynthesis system.

Density is one of the most important parameters in construction of asphalt mixtures and pavement engineering. When a mixture is properly designed and compacted, it will contain enough air voids to prevent plastic deformation but will have low enough air voids to prevent water ingress and moisture damage. The ability to map asphalt pavement density has been identified as a key variable that predicts the future life and performance of asphalt pavement. We describe a new instrument, the Pavement Density Profiler (PDP) that has evolved from many years of making measurements of road properties. This instrument measures the electromagnetic (EM) wave impedance to infer the asphalt pavement density (or degree of compaction), locally and over profiles.

Reverberation chambers are successfully adopted to test last generation wireless communication systems. The aim is the replication of realistic propagation condition in outdoor and indoor situations where the multipath contribution statistically overlaps to the direct path between the base station and the user terminal. The insertion of quantified absorbing materials allows to tune the power delay profile, the Rician K-factor, and the coherence bandwidth according to real life situations.

International audience; Many real-world tasks for autonomous agents benefit from understanding dynamic inter-object interactions. Detecting, analyzing and differentiating between the various ways that an object can be interacted with provides implicit information about its function. This can help train autonomous agents to handle objects and understand unknown scenes. We describe a general mathematical framework to analyze and classify interactions, defined as dynamic motions performed by an active object onto a passive one. We factorize interactions via motion features computed in the spatio-temporal domain, and encoded into a global, object-centric signature. Equipped with a similarity measure to compare such signatures, we showcase classification of interactions with a single object. We also propose a novel acquisition setup combining RGBD sensing with a virtual reality (VR) display, to capture interactions with purely virtual objects.

Intelligent Environments (IE) are a very active area of research and a number of applications are currently being deployed in domains ranging from smart home to e-health and autonomous vehicles. In a number of cases, IE operate together with (or to support) humans, and it is therefore fundamental that IE are thoroughly verified. In this paper we present how a set of techniques and tools developed for the verification of software code can be employed in the verification of IE described by means of event-condition-action rules. In particular, we reduce the problem of verifying key properties of these rules to satisfiability and termination problems that can be addressed using state-of-the-art SMT solvers and program analysers. We introduce a tool called vIRONy that implements these techniques and we validate our approach against a number of case studies from the literature.