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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

International audience; Reconfigurable Intelligent Meta-surfaces (RIMs) are particular devices able to control and manipulate radio frequency wireless signals. This promising technology allows to improve the reliability of wireless networks, thanks to the capacity of reflecting the desired signals through appropriate phase shifts. The joint use of RIMs and Computer Vision (CV) technology is the main objective of this paper. This synergistic approach is used to correctly identify the specific configuration of a radiation pattern, to be used as input for computing optimal coding sequences of the RIM. Indeed, by the means of a CV algorithm it is possible to infer a connectivity graph related to a real scenario, where people is moving. The information about network nodes such as their distance, the relative position, etc. is used for feeding an intelligent logic, able to compute the optimal configuration for redirecting the signals towards a given receiver target node. Numerical results show the huge potentiality of this combined approach in terms of interference reduction. It has been observed that for high traffic load, it is possible to reduce the average interference in the network of 40%. Furthermore, an analysis including the positioning estimation error of the CV algorithm has been addressed, in order to consider how it affects the interference reduction. Results show that, even though there is an increasing effect of interference, when the error is accounted, the interference reduction impact is still important.

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.

Smart city services are enabled by a massive use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The huge amount of sensors, and terminals with a great variety of typologies and applications, requires a secure way to manage them. Capillary networks can be seen as a short range extension of conventional access network in order to efficiently capture the IoT traffic, and are enablers for smart city services. They can include both IP and non-IP devices, and security can become an issue, especially when simple unidirectional communication devices are considered. The main goal of this paper is to analyze security aspects in IoT capillary networks including unidirectional and bidirectional IP or non-IP devices. We propose an algorithm for secure access for uni- and bi-directional devices. The security procedure is based on a secure key renewal (without any exchange in air), considering a local clock time and a time interval of key validity. Following previous work in 2014 by Giuliano et al. , in this paper we assess the duration of the validity of the time window, and present extended simulation results in terms of (average) transmission time in a realistic scenario, i.e., including the presence of disturber(s), then providing indications for the setting of the duration of the key validity time window. Finally, we present the benchmark analysis in order to assess the effectiveness of our approach with respect to other existing standards, as well as the security analysis in terms of typical attacks.

To provide advanced services to citizens, Smart City services are enabled by a massive use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The envisaged huge amount of sensors, and terminals with a great variety of typologies and applications, do not allow having a unique way to manage them, requiring for example minimal packaging and presentation overhead for many of them. In general in a network providing Smart City services, both IP and non-IP devices are present. In this paper, we tackle the security issue for non-IP devices able to connect by a short-range with a mediator gateway, forming a capillary access network, which can be seen as a short range extension of conventional access network in order to efficiently capture the IoT traffic. In particular, we propose security algorithms both for uni- and bi-directional terminals, depending on the terminal capabilities. The security algorithms are based on a local key renewal (without any exchange in air), performed just considering the local clock time. Performance are obtained respect to the maximum number of terminals that can be managed by one mediator gateway and the maximum packet delay as a function of the number of terminals in the area. © 2014 IEEE.