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Recently, pushed by COVID-19 pandemic, the need of respecting social distancing has motivated several researchers to define novel technological solutions to monitor and track user movements. Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) world has addressed this challenge by means of the use of different technologies, such as Bluetooth, in order to track user inter-distance and encounter time. Technology solutions should be able to not only track contacts, but also alert users to restore social distancing. In this paper, we present IMPERSONAL framework, with the twofold aim of both (i) tracking and monitoring social distancing, and (ii) alerting users in case of gatherings. The framework is based on a sub-network of computer vision-based devices that is adopted to monitor and track users’movements to estimate their inter-distance and compute the encounter time. Such information is then the input to an Internet of Things sub-network, aiming to retrieve the anonymous IDs of people belonging to a gathering, as well as to send alert messages to them. We assess IMPERSONAL framework by means of extensive Monte Carlo simulations and experimental results, showing its effectiveness in terms of accuracy in correctly identifying users and gatherings in videos taken from live cameras, both in case of indoor and outdoor real scenarios. The benefits of IMPERSONAL framework are expressed in terms of the ability to track people, solve gatherings and send warning messages. IEEE

The European train control system employs GSM-R for communications between trains and the command/control centers. GSM-R technology is quite old and will be replaced in the near future by other technologies offering less expensive solutions, especially for regional and local lines. This article investigates a new telecommunication solution based on multi radio bearers using cellular and satellite public networks as an alternative to the deployment of a dedicated infrastructure. A test campaign on a 300 km of rail line (about 10,000 km of tests) has been carried out to evaluate the performance of cellular and satellite networks in a railway environment. Test trial results presented and discussed in this article have been used to assess the performance of a multipath TCP protocol to effectively support multi-bearer communications. A discussion of the economic benefits and the potential industrial implications of the proposed solution concludes the article.