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Indoor localisation is a thriving field, whose progresses are mainly led by innovations in sensor technology, both hardware and software. With a focus on smartphone-based personal navigation, we examine the evolution of sensing technologies in eleven leading applications. In order to select applications we choose among independently-tested prototypes, as opposed to simulation or laboratory-only experiments. To this end, we look at the best performers in the smartphone-based Tracks of IPIN competitions. This selection is particularly severe and significant, as this competition Track is performed live, without an opportunity for competitors to instrument or prepare the site or to know the path in advance and with only two attempts allowed, of which the best result is taken. An independent actor holds in hand the smartphone running the competing system, and results are downloaded from the phone immediately after the competition path is completed, without any post-processing. We show how sensing technologies have evolved from 2014 to 2019 and show a trend towards improving accuracy performance. Last, we provide insight in the role that sensors and algorithms play in the evolution of smartphone-based indoor localisation solutions.

This volume contains the Work-in-Progress papers presented at IPIN 2019, the Tenth International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (http://ipin2019.isti.cnr.it/posters) held in Pisa, Italy, on September 30th-October 3rd, 2019.

This document extends the deliverable D3.2.1 - Environmental Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) prototypes describing: i) the outcomes of the final iteration of the sensors selection for developing the environmental monitoring system of NESTORE; ii) the integrated system tests on the selected sensors. The selection followed the recommendations coming from the WP2 activities in terms of needed monitoring variables and unobtrusiveness. The document also presents the chosen technologies and their integration in the system using available off-the-shelf and custom devices by means of the Web of Things paradigm.

This document describes the outcomes of the first iteration of the sensors selection for developing the environmental monitoring system of NESTORE. The selection followed the recommendations coming from the WP2 activities in terms of needed monitoring variables and tries to address the requirements coming from the WP6 co-design approach. The document also presents an overview of the chosen technologies and their integration in the system using available off-the-shelf devices by means of the Web of Things paradigm.

No standard methods for evaluating indoor localization systems are generally accepted and used by researchers and industry. The lack of common test beds is a problem when evaluating the relative performance of different systems. As a step towards tackling this problem, the EvAAL Indoor Localization competition was launched in 2011, followed by the ongoing series of IPIN competitions. The EvAAL evaluation framework defines tools and metrics usable for comparing both real-time systems and off-line methods based on recorded data. The EvAAL framework is discussed in its incarnation along the various editions of the EvAAL and IPIN competitions, together with a discussion on the performance and technologies used by the competing systems.

This document reports on the final version of the sensor network and the GiraffPlus integrated system.The final version delivered at month 36incorporates the input from the last evaluation phase leading to a refined system.The final version of the middleware infrastructure integrates a more complete set of sensors and functionalities. Indeed, the control bus functionality has been implemented and tested with new sensors and actuators, a new wearable technology capable of continuous heart rate monitoring has been analyzed, and a new web monitoring tool for checking the status of the test sites has been deployed. The final version of the Giraff platform is also described,addressing safety issues and general improvements requests coming from the last evaluation phase.In addition, final considerations on the assessment of security and safety in the GiraffPlus system are also presented as an appendix.

This deliverable follows the same structure of D2.2, since it is an update on the status of the activities defined therein: Platform support framework, Training framework, and Open source strategy. There were almost no changes in the Platform support framework itself. After a short introduction to the (few) updates in the support framework, a set of statistics of the status on all the different issue trackers is presented, followed by a list of all issues opened and updated within the period of analysis of this version. Updates on the Training framework itself are few as well, but these are followed by a list of all available sources of training materials set up by different tasks in ReAAL. A short list of events where coaching was provided is also available. Finally the activities maintaining the Open Source community around the platform are described, including the next steps to follow.

For the third consecutive year, the Wireless Networks laboratory of the Institute of Information and Technologies (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) was the main organising force behind the EvAAL competition, an effort financed by the universAAL FP7 project and embedded into the AALOA association.

Deliverable D9.1-A in Work Package 9 is the first deliverable related to the dissemination of the universAAL project objectives and results. The development of a project website, leaflet and brochure aims to create social awareness about the benefits of ambient assisted living (AAL) for elderly people as well as for developers and providers of care services. The first section is the Role of the deliverable that presents the scope and goals of the document the relationships with other work packages and particular deliverables from work packages 8 and 9. To establish the dissemination activities, identification of universAAL stakeholders was required. To be consequent with the stakeholder classification described in work packages 1 and 8, D9.1-A and thus work package 9, adopted the same classification to target the individuals, team, organization with interest in, or concerns relative to the universAAL platform. Section 3 describes the universAAL public website, which aim is to disseminate project results, providing information related to the project and the partners and for the communication among all interested partners. The section presents the website layout, development, contents, navigation, evaluation and maintenance. The structure and mainly the content of the website will adapt to project evolution to better satisfy new dissemination requirements. In addition to the website, a leaflet and brochure have been designed to give a first general picture of the project for a general audience and they are presented in Section 4. They maintain a similar layout to the website and address reader/target users to the website or contact the project coordinator. We also made available a power point presentation to be used and adapted depending on the event where the project is presented. Finally, section 5 outlines the future steps to periodically update the dissemination material as the project progresses. This material will reflect the changes of the dissemination plan (D9.2), project development, needs and results and aligned with new dissemination opportunities.

This document reports about the structure and organization of the EvAAL (standing for Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking) competition. It first summarizes the meaning and purpose of EvAAL with respect to the architecture, platform and services of universAAL and with the other deliverables related to the community building activities. Then it discusses the background of EvAAL, in particular how EvAAL fits the community building strategy and its purpose from a technical point of view. Then it presents the intended audience of EvAAL and discusses previous experiences of competitions organized to support other communities in order to identify the best practices. The second part of this document describes the organization and structure of EvAAL, specifying the structure of the committees and their roles, the financial aspects, the tasks to be done with respect to establishing and running the competition, the criteria to be used to measure the success of EvAAL and to drive its future competitions, and the modalities of marketing of EvAAL. Finally the document summarizes a roadmap to the first competition.

The necessity of providing broadband connectivity to lowdensely populated areas has given rise to a big interest for hybrid networks, specially those composed of a satellite backhaul and a wireless terrestrial network. In this paper, we focus on a DVB-S2/RCS system with Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) for the satellite link and a Wi-Fi network for the indoor terrestrial wireless link. Figure 1 depicts the considered scenario, which reproduces the hybrid network used to give service to small villages along the Amazon River [1]. The video stream is transmitted by the video stream server to the satellite transmitter, which broadcasts it to the satellite network.

An XML schema for scientific metadata is described. It is used for the CostGlue archival program, developed in the framework of the European Union COST Action 285: "Modelling and simulation tools for research in emerging multi-service telecommunications". The schema is freely available under the GNU LGPL license at http://wnet.isti.cnr.it/software/costglue/schema/2007/CostGlue.xsd, or at its official repository, at http://lt.fe.uni-lj. si/costglue/schema/2007/costglue.xsd.

One of the aims of the SatNEx (Satellite Network of Excellence) European project is to provide the scientific community that operates on satellite communications with simulation/emulation tools and real measurement campaigns, in order to support various research activities that investigate problems in satellite communications at different levels of the OSI stack. In particular, one among the various joint activities (JAs) in SatNEx is devoted to "Research tools, trials and testbeds", and, within this, one group of activities concentrates on "Access, network, and transport layer trials" (JA 2410). This paper addresses the results obtained just within this joint activity, thus presenting both the real experiments carried out on a satellite platform, and describing the specific testbeds developed for this aim. The high number of authors of this paper is an indication of the strong collaborative work sustained, the large measurement campaigns, and the complexity in setting up some tests. In the SatNEx project we envisaged a quite complex reference scenario, where particular research aspects needed to be sustained by measurements and adequate tools of investigation. The research activity developed in SatNEx addresses the most relevant aspects of satellite communications, such as access schemes, advanced networking, end-to-end quality of service, transport performance, and deployment of new applications. In this view, specific integration issues among heterogeneous networks, encompassing satellite and wireless segments, were taken into account. The testbeds developed allowed the study of interplanetary environments, as well. In this specific case, attention was put in the communication and networking challenges arising in the design of a telecommunication infrastructure suitable to convey data derived from remote stations, located on planets, and addressed to Earth data gathering centres.

Broadcasting is an efficient and scalable way of transmitting data over wireless channels to an unlimited number of clients. In this paper the problem of al locating data to multiple channels is studied, assuming skewed al location of most pop- ular data items to less loaded channels, flat data scheduling per channel, and the presence of unre- coverable channel transmission errors. The objec- tive is that of minimizing the average expected de- lay experienced by clients. Two different channel error models are considered: the geometric model and the Gilbert-El liot one. In the former model, each packet transmission has the same probabil- ity to fail and each transmission error is indepen- dent from the others. In the latter one, bursts of erroneous or error-free packet transmissions due to wireless fading channels are modeled. For the geometric channel error model and uniform data item lengths, an optimal solution can be found in polynomial time when al l the channels have the same probability to fail. Heuristic algorithms are exhibited for the geometric model and non-uniform data item lengths as wel l as for the Gilbert-El liot error model and both uniform and non-uniform data lengths. Extensive simulations show that such heuristics provide good sub-optimal solutions when tested on benchmarks whose item popularities fol- low Zipf distributions.

Few researchers have undertook the task of measuring the wireless channel at the frame level to understand performance issues related to frame loss and signal strength. This paper proposes a measurement procedure for terrestrial wireless networks based on cheap hardware and custom software, and validates it through experiments on real-word wireless environment. In order to validate the measurement procedure, we carry out a comprehensive measurement campaign in a rural environment and we evaluate statistics about frame loss and signal level in the IEEE 802.11b wireless channel. Frames are transmitted and received by using two cheap laptops with standard Linux drivers and purposely written software. A first validation step compares the behaviour of the received signal power level with the two-ray propagation model. A subsequent step compares the observed frame loss with the expected coding gain at various transmission rates. Graphs of the observed frame loss rate at different transmission rates are provided for a rural environment, where the two-ray propagation model is a good fit.

Few researchers have performed measurements of a Wi-Fi channel at the frame level in order to understand performance issues by relating frame errors and signal strength. This paper presents results relative to ad hoc measurements in a rural environment. We show that a simple double regression propagation model like the one used in the ns-2 simulator can miss important transmission impairments that are apparent even at short transmitter-receiver distances. We propose a two- ray propagation model which improves on those commonly used for simulation purposes. Frames were transmitted and received by using two cheap laptops with standard Linux drivers. Measurements also show that packet loss at the frame level is a Bernoullian process for time spans of few seconds, and that longer time spans exhibit a more complex behaviour, meaning that the 2-state Markov-modulated process often used in the literature is not a good match for rural areas.

Free software licenses are a natural choice in a research environment. In the following, we will try to back this simple statement with some considerations and examples, in an effort to analyse the significant interactions between free software and research.

Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) are two communication protocol standards which define a physical layer and a MAC layer for wireless communications within a short range (from a few meters up to 100 meters) with low power consumption (from less than 1 mW up to 100 mW). Bluetooth is oriented to connecting close devices, serving as a substitute for cables, while Wi-Fi is oriented towards computer-to-computer connections, as an extension of or substitution for cabled LANs. In this paper we offer an overview of these popular wireless communication standards, comparing their main features and behaviors in terms of various metrics, including capacity, network topology, security, quality of service support, and power consumption.

In this paper we present VnL-TDMA, a new MAC (medium access control) protocol far accessing in TDMA a satellite channel shared among various earth stations which transmit mixed traffic (real-time and non-real time). We concentrate on the analysis of the real-time allocation far variable bit rate (VBR) traffic, and analyse its performance using a synthetically generated VBR traffic modelled on the basis of the statistical parameters of an MPEG-2 coded movie in VBR mode. The peak traffic rate of the movie is almost four times higher than its mean rate, which means that trivial peak rate allocation would waste a lot of the satellite channel bandwidth, while VnL makes unused bandwidth instantaneously available to all earth stations to enable them to transmit best-effort traffic.

We propose a model that describes the rain attenuation process, which can be useful for designing atmospheric fade countermeasure systems for satellite communications. We analyzed a data set of uplink (30 GHz) and down-link (20 GHz) attenuation values averaged over I second intervals. The data are samples relative to 10 significant events, for a total of 180,000 s, recorded at the Spine d' Adda (North of Italy) station using the Olympus satellite. Our analysis is based on the fact that the plot of attenuation versus time recalls the behaviour of a self-similar process. Starting from this observation, we make various considerations and propose a fractional Brownian motion model for modeling the attenuation process. We describe the model in detail, with pictures showing the apparent self-similarity of the measured data, then we show that the Hurst parameter of the process is a simple function of the attenuation. In order to produce useful data for simulating fade countermeasure systems, one needs to interpolate the measured attenuation traces, which have I s granularity, so we describe a method for producing random data that interpolate the measured samples, while preserving some of their interesting statistical properties. We conclude by suggesting a possible application for such a model, which is the subject of current research.

This paper presents the Italian interconnection of terrestrial and satellite networks by means of the FODA/IBEA system. A bridge implemented the interconnection of the satellite network on one side and the Ethernet and Token Ring terrestrial networks on the other side. With such an architecture, an experiment of videoconferencing was proved between Pisa and Florence, while data generated by TCP/IP based applications were also transmitted. The satellite network is described in the first part of the paper, while the bridge to access the satellite network is presented in the second pan. This bridge is part of a multimedia network which also includes the applications (voice, video and a file transfer application based on TCP/IP) and the internal conununication media.

This report describes a satellite access scheme in TDMA for both synchronous and asynchronous data, able to counter the fade of the signal by acting on the coding and on the bit rate of the data (FODAIIBEA-TDMA). FODA/IBEA is the natural evolution of the FODA-TDMA satellite access scheme working at 2 Mbit/s fixed rate with data 1/2 coded or uncoded [23]. FODA-TDMA was used in the European SATINE-n experiment [8]. We remind here that the term FODA/IBEA system is comprehensive of the FODA/tBEA-TDMAW satellite access scheme and of the hardware protorype realised by the Marconi R.C. (U.K.). Both of them come from the experience of the fixed rate phase, but they have been completely re-designed to work at variable coding and bit rates to cope with the fade of the signal due to bad atmospheric conditions when the system is working at frequencies above 10 GHz. In addition, up-link power control can also be operated from stations having sufficient power margin, to improve the possibility of the system to cope with fading. The system has been used on the Olympus satellite and on the Italsat satellite.

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The plarrof the tests to carry out with the prototype of a TDMA system developed for LAN interconnection is presented.Hints about the problem of channel quality estimation are also given. The multicarrier trasponder access is investigated to reach the maximum utilisation of the transponder. The LAN interconnectrcn architecture is sketched.

A multi-application traffic generator (MTGJ. whose purpose is the generation of packets over a LAN, is presented. It was born as a tool for the performance measurement of a complex TOMA satellite access scheme currently being tested at CNUCE. The generated traffic simulates the traffic produced by a number of both isochronous and anisochronous applications, thus allowing the measurement of many parameters relevant to the communication network. From the lest point of view, data generated by the MTG system is equivalent to data generated by real applications spread over a network. The MTG system is described and its performance figures are shown.