Papers by Antonino Orsino
Future Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems will be characterized by ultra-dense areas, where u... more Future Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems will be characterized by ultra-dense areas, where users are gradually asking for new multimedia applications and hungry-bandwidth services. Therefore, a promising solution to boost and optimize this future wireless heterogeneous networks is represented by the Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) with the joint use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In such a scenario, low power base stations and device-to-device communications (D2D), involved into traditional cellular network, represented a possible solution to offload the heavy traffic of macrocells, while guaranteeing user experience as well. Nevertheless, the high centralization and the limited-capacity backhauls makes it difficult to perform centralized control plane functions on a large network scale. To address this issue, we investigate the integration of two enabling technologies for C-RAN (i.e., SDN and NFV) in the current 5G heterogeneous wireless architecture in order to exploit properly proximity-based transmissions among devices. Then, in order to validate the applicability of our proposed architecture, we consider the case of D2D pair handover where we show that our solution is able to decrease the number of signaling messages needed to handoff the D2D pair from a source to a target base station and, at the same time, the time execution for the entire handover process.
In this paper a trust-based coalition formation game is proposed to design op-portunistic hop-by-... more In this paper a trust-based coalition formation game is proposed to design op-portunistic hop-by-hop forwarding schemes, relying on cellular Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, to enhance content uploading services. The User Equipments (UEs) are sources of data to be uploaded to a cellular base station (eN-odeB) and are assumed to be rational self-interested players as they aim at maximizing their own utility. To this aim, the UEs cooperate to opportunisti-cally implement proximity-based data exchanges where the presence of malicious nodes in the network is a constant threat for the successful cooperation. To cope with this issue, reliability and reputation notions are considered to model the level of trust among the players. Taking inspiration from the recent Social In-ternet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, social-awareness of the devices is spotted as a key parameter to effectively define the wished trustworthiness. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated through a simulative analysis showing a relevant reduction in the data loss due to malicious behavior of a subset of the devices. In particular, up to 86% reduction in terms of data loss is obtained with respect to the case where the proposed trust model is not implemented. Moreover, the trust-based and social-aware solution also guarantees higher gains in terms of the uploading time for the devices taking part of the cooperative D2D-based content uploading.
Fifth generation (5G) systems are expected to introduce a revolution in the ICT domain with innov... more Fifth generation (5G) systems are expected to introduce a revolution in the ICT domain with innovative networking features, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. Accordingly, in-proximity devices directly communicate with each other, thus avoiding routing the data across the network infrastructure. This innovative technology is deemed to be also of high relevance to support effective heterogeneous objects interconnection within future IoT ecosystems. However, several open challenges shall be solved to achieve a seamless and reliable deployment of proximity-based communications. In this paper, we give a contribution to trust and security enhancements for opportunistic hop-by-hop forwarding schemes that rely on cellular D2D communications. To tackle the presence of malicious nodes in the network, reliability and reputation notions are introduced to model the level of trust among involved devices. To this aim, social-awareness of devices is accounted for, to better support D2D-based multihop content uploading. Our simulative results in small-scale IoT environments, demonstrate that data loss due to malicious nodes can be drastically reduced and gains in uploading time be reached with the proposed solution.
Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of "smart" objects di... more Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of "smart" objects disseminated from the largest "Smart City" to the smallest "Smart Home". In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena providing a large coherent infrastructure and a wide wireless connectivity to the devices. However, since LTE-A was originally designed to support high data rates and large data size, novel solutions are required to enable an efficient use of radio resources to convey small data packets typically exchanged by IoT applications in "smart" environments. On the other hand, the typically high energy consumption required by cellular communications is a serious obstacle to large scale IoT deployments under cellular connectivity as in the case of Smart City scenarios. Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are considered as a viable solution to reduce the energy consumption for the devices. The particular approach presented in this paper consists in appointing one of the IoT smart devices as a collector of all data from a cluster of objects using D2D links, thus acting as an aggregator toward the eNodeB. By smartly adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on the communication links, we will show it is possible to maximize the radio resource utilization as a function of the total amount of data to be sent. A further benefit that we will highlight is the possibility to reduce the transmission power when a more robust MCS is adopted. A comprehensive performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios will testify the achievable gains in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization in the envisaged D2D-based IoT data collection.
In the emerging Fifth Generation (5G) systems mobile social networks will play an important role ... more In the emerging Fifth Generation (5G) systems mobile social networks will play an important role for disseminating information and multimedia contents. In such a scenario, short range transmissions and multicast services are considered as promising technologies in order to disseminate contents as fast as possible. This paper proposes a viral information diffusion approach for improving the information diffusion time among a large number of users. A novel expected information diffusion time is considered by taking into account system metrics on both network and social side. In particular, we defined a new metric named social network contact time which describes the social interaction time between a generic user and the social platform. We compared the proposed approach with conventional multicast scheme and social information diffusion approach based on distance. Results show that the proposed viral algorithm achieves considerable gains in term of information diffusion time and data rate per UE. In particular, the gain experienced by the users in term of content dissemination varies between the 14% and 48%.
Multimedia content delivery over satellite system is considered as a promising service in the fut... more Multimedia content delivery over satellite system is considered as a promising service in the future fifth generation (5G) cellular systems. The aim of this work is to design a low-computational radio resource management (RRM) multicast algorithm, named Near-Optimal Subgroup Solution (NOSS), for efficiently managing multimedia video content delivery over satellite network. The idea is to perform the radio spectrum allocation on a per-group basis, thus splitting all the multicast members into different subgroups according to the experienced channel quality. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to overcome the limitation of the previous techniques proposed in literature in terms of user throughput. As a further result, the proposed NOSS approach resulted to be also efficient in terms of fairness and robust to the long propagation delay of satellite links.
In emerging Fifth Generation (5G) systems, mobile social networks are expected to play an importa... more In emerging Fifth Generation (5G) systems, mobile social networks are expected to play an important role to enable proximity-based content distribution among devices. In this paper, we address social-awareness aspects and device-to-device (D2D) communications for information diffusion solutions in emergency scenarios. Context-aware information is collected from a set of devices deployed in the environment and received data are integrated and elaborated at the cellular base station before being delivered. In such a framework, we model the expected information diffusion time by taking into account both networking-and sociality-related metrics. In particular, we introduce the so-called social inter-contact time which is able to model the interaction frequency between the user and a generic social platform. The proposed approach is compared with alternative solutions where the dissemination process is either managed through direct links from the central base station, as a conventional multicast scheme, or with the support from proximity communications, as a D2D-enhanced multicast scheme. The results of a performance assessment study show that the proposed framework achieves considerable gains, up to 50%, in terms of overall information diffusion time and data rate per UE.
In future Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems, mobile social networks are deemed to play an im... more In future Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems, mobile social networks are deemed to play an important role in the information and multimedia content dissemination. From the technological perspective, Device-to-Device (D2D) communi- cations and multicast services have been identified as potential enabling technologies for a fast and efficient content transmis- sions. In this paper, we propose a viral information diffusion approach that brings together these different ingredients with the objective of minimizing the content delivery time experienced by the users over the cellular infrastructure. To this aim, we model an expected diffusion time where network metrics and social relationships are combined and used to drive the choices in the dissemination process. In particular, a new metric called social network contact time is introduced, able to efficiently characterize the user behavior in checking a notification received on a smart device. A novel solution effectively combining multicast, D2D communications and social network concepts is proposed and evaluated through simulations in a wide range of scenarios. The comparison with the legacy LTE multicast technology shows how the proposed solution is able to introduce considerable gains in terms of (i) average diffusion time per user, (ii) average throughput, and (iii) Jain’s fairness index.
The fast growing of multimedia applications and enhanced device (i.e., in capacity and computing)... more The fast growing of multimedia applications and enhanced device (i.e., in capacity and computing) leads the network infrastructure to manage a number of users with different channel qualities, application requirements, and service constraints. In such a scenario, is evident the need to find a resource scheduling procedure able to guarantee good levels of performance not only on the network-side but also to the user-side. To this end, this paper introduces a novel approach for multicast resource allocation based on the idea of exploiting a multi-criteria decision method (i.e., namely TOPSIS) properly designed to simultaneously take into account both provider and user benefits during the spectrum allocation process. In particular, we compared a promising multicast radio resource strategy, i.e., subgrouping, tailored to exploit different cost functions represented by (i) local throughput, (ii) local fairness, and (iii) subgroup minimum dissatisfaction index. The obtained results, performed for the delivery of scalable multicast video flows in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) macrocell, demonstrate the effectiveness of the TOPSIS-based radio resource management scheme, which outperforms existing approaches from the literature. Indeed, it succeeds to provide higher data rate and an improved user satisfaction when considering multicast users experiencing different levels of channel and service quality.
Next-generation device-to-device (D2D) communication technology is rapidly taking shape today, wh... more Next-generation device-to-device (D2D) communication technology is rapidly taking shape today, where a cellular network assists proximal users at all stages of their interaction. To this end, the respective D2D performance aspects have been thoroughly characterized by past research, from discovery to connection establishment, security, and service continuity. However, prospective D2D-enabled applications and services envision highly opportunistic device contacts as a consequence of unpredictable human user mobility. Therefore, the impact of mobility on D2D communication needs a careful investigation to understand the practical operational efficiency of future cellular-assisted D2D systems. Along these lines, this article offers a first-hand tutorial on various implications of D2D mobility, across different user movement patterns and mobility-related parameters and proposes an assessment methodology for D2D-enabled systems. The rigorous system-level evaluation conducted by this study delivers important conclusions on the effects of user mobility in emerging D2D-centric systems.
Device-to-device (D2D) communication is one of the most promising innovations in the next-generat... more Device-to-device (D2D) communication is one of the most promising innovations in the next-generation wireless ecosystem, which improves the degrees of spatial reuse and creates novel social opportunities for users in proximity. As standardization behind network-assisted D2D technology takes shape, it becomes clear that security of direct connectivity is one of the key concerns on the way to its ultimate user adoption. This is especially true when a personal user cluster (that is, a smartphone and associated wearable devices) does not have a reliable connection to the cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that embraces security of geographically proximate user clusters. More specifically, we employ game-theoretic mechanisms for appropriate user clustering taking into account both spatial and social notions of proximity. Further, our information security procedures implemented on top of this clustering scheme enable continuous support for secure direct communication even in case of unreliable/unavailable cellular connectivity. Explicitly incorporating the effects of user mobility, we numerically evaluate the proposed framework by confirming that it has the potential to substantially improve the resulting system-wide performance.
The ever increasing demand in mobile data traffic, fueled by the fast proliferation of bandwidth-... more The ever increasing demand in mobile data traffic, fueled by the fast proliferation of bandwidth-hungry wireless applications and services, has imposed new challenges on data rate requirements in emerging 5G systems. To meet these demanding expectations, the mainstream direction for the network operators is to deploy a higher density of various cellular infrastructure. In light of this unprecedented network densification, the performance of cellular handover procedures becomes of paramount importance, aggravated by the unpredictable user mobility. Along these lines, this paper seeks to augment future handover operation by employing the recent Device-to-Device (D2D) communications technology. The underlying rationale behind our proposal is to equip the mobile users with better-quality direct links and thus improve the resulting service perception under the typical 3GPP LTE handover procedures. Primarily in frequently-visited areas of overlapping cellular coverage, D2D connectivity can readily offer the much needed data relaying capability to proximal devices performing the cell change. To this end, our proposed D2D-assisted handover scheme efficiently delivers the attractive energy efficiency, data rate, and packet delivery ratio benefits. By utilizing the tools from stochastic geometry, we derive the main performance metrics of interest for our solution, such as the distribution of signal-to-noise ratio experienced by a user entering the zone of overlapping coverage and the amount of time it remains in contact with a suitable D2D partner. The gains over the standard LTE handover procedures for all the considered parameters are further confirmed by extensive system-level simulations in video streaming and multimedia content downloading scenarios.
Machine-type communications (MTC) are expected to be a key enablers in the Internet of Things (Io... more Machine-type communications (MTC) are expected to be a key enablers in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem by providing ubiquitous connectivity among a new type of small devices (e.g., sensors , wearable devices, smartphone) without (or with minimal) the need of human intervention. In such a scenario, the architecture as well as the radio resource management (RRM) of next-to-come 5G systems needs to be enhanced in order to cope with the exponential growth of low-latency and low-energy MTC traffic. To this end, we propose a dynamic RRM policy which (i) exploits an heterogeneous networks (HetNets) deployment aiming to handle massive huge load of MTC devices and (ii) adopts a spectrum sharing approach tailored to improve the spectrum utilization in MTC environments. By comparing our proposal with current policies in literature, simulations conducted through the open-source Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) shown that our proposed use of spectrum sharing technique can efficiently improve the performance of MTC traffic in terms of spectral efficiency, power consumption, and fairness.
The Device-to-Device (D2D) communication over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular system is em... more The Device-to-Device (D2D) communication over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular system is emerging as a key technology to support safety and traffic efficiency applications in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs). By offering a flexible usage of the radio interface, it allows vehicles to directly communicate each other, while experiencing low-latency and highly reliable data delivery. Anyway, the impact that application traffic patterns and transmission settings have on the overall performance is still unclear and in this context it is necessary a deep study for driving future research activities. To this end, the present contribution proposes a flexible methodology that characterizes, from a system level point of view, the upper bound performance of vehicular D2D communications as a function of the application, the access layer settings, and the channel behavior. Model outcomes have been used to provide insights about the most suitable transmission parameters, the achievable transmission range, and the supported vehicles density in VANETs scenarios.
Driven by the unprecedented increase of mobile data traffic, device-to-device (D2D) communication... more Driven by the unprecedented increase of mobile data traffic, device-to-device (D2D) communications technology is rapidly moving into the mainstream of fifth-generation (5G) networking landscape. While D2D connectivity has originally emerged as a technology enabler for public safety services, it is likely to remain in the heart of the 5G ecosystem by spawning a wide diversity of proximate applications and services. In this work, we argue that the widespread adoption of the direct communications paradigm is unlikely without embracing the concepts of trust and social-aware cooperation between end users and network operators. However, such adoption remains conditional on identifying adequate incentives that engage humans and their connected devices into a plethora of collective activities. To this end, the mission of our project is to advance the vision of social-aware and trusted D2D connectivity, as well as to facilitate its further adoption. We begin by reviewing the various types of underlying incentives with the emphasis on sociality and trust, discuss these factors specifically for humans and for networked devices (machines), as well as propose a novel framework allowing to construct the much needed incentive-aware D2D applications. Our supportive system-level performance evaluations suggest that trusted and social-aware direct connectivity has the potential to decisively augment the network performance. We conclude by outlining the future perspectives of its development across research and standardization sectors.
IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, 2016
Multimedia content delivery over satellite systems is considered as a promising service in emergi... more Multimedia content delivery over satellite systems is considered as a promising service in emerging 5G networks. The aim of this work is to design a novel radio resource management (RRM) algorithm for efficiently managing multicast multimedia content transmission over satellite network. The proposed approach performs the spectrum management on a per-group basis, by splitting multicast terminals into different subgroups according to the experienced channel qualities. We demonstrate that subgrouping policy defined by the authors as multicast subgrouping-maximum satisfaction index (MS-MSI), based on a new metric (i.e., MSI), overcomes the weakness of the previous techniques proposed in the literature and provides the best trade-off between user throughput and fairness. As a further result, we demonstrate that MS-MSI is robust to the long propagation delay of satellite links. An extensive simulation campaign has been conducted by considering several satellite environments.
This paper investigates on novel effective schemes based on Device-to-Device (D2D) communications... more This paper investigates on novel effective schemes based on Device-to-Device (D2D) communications for data relaying, to upload content from a set of cooperating User Equipments (UEs) acting as sources of the data towards a cellular base station (eNodeB). Enabling factors of the resulting cooperative data uploading able to improve the system performance are: (i) the differentiated channel quality experienced by UEs and (ii) the introduced possibility to pool together the allocated radio resources. A constrained coalition formation game is used for multi-hop D2D overlapping coalition formation, where the time needed to upload the content is the utility for the players. The proposed model directly considers the coverage constraints for the D2D links among the players. The proposed solution allows to determine the final cooperating network topology as a tree of overlapping coalitions. We demonstrate that the solution guarantees an average gain in the uploading time for the UEs up to a 23% with respect to non-cooperative content uploading methods.
2015 IEEE 26th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), 2015
The enhancements introduced by Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) cellular systems are mainly f... more The enhancements introduced by Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) cellular systems are mainly focused on boosting the data rates offered to terminals and to efficiently manage the transmission of large size data packets. However, focusing on the next-to-come scenarios of 5G wireless systems where machine-type communications (MTC) will compete in an equal footing with human-type communications (HTC), novel solutions are needed to efficiently exploit the radio resources for conveying the typical small MTC data. With this aim, this paper addresses the use of short-range device-to-device (D2D) communications as enabling technology to efficiently managing the radio spectrum and to reduce the energy consumption of MTC devices. We consider a scenario where MTC nodes are grouped in a cluster; among the cluster members, one terminal acts as aggregator in charge for: (i) receiving data from neighboring terminals via D2D links and (ii) relaying the aggregated data to the base station via macro-cellular link. The main contribution of this paper is to compare the performance of the most popular D2D technologies, i.e., WiFi-Direct and LTE-Direct, used to transmit data toward the aggregator. The performance evaluation in terms of latency, resource utilization and energy efficiency has been conducted in a wide set of scenarios by varying the number of clustered devices and their channel conditions.
This paper investigates relay-based schemes in cellular systems, where multihop Device-to-Device ... more This paper investigates relay-based schemes in cellular systems, where multihop Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are exploited for content uploading toward the eNodeB. All User Equipments (UEs) are sources of their own content and form a "multihop D2D chain'', with the head of the chain being in charge of uploading all the generated contents to the eNodeB. By pooling the cellular radio resources assigned to the D2D chain and by using high-quality short-range radio links, the proposed cooperative content uploading scheme guarantees lower upload delays than in the traditional cellular mode operation. To model the D2D chains formation in a cell and to best characterize self-interested users concerned about their own payoff, a constrained coalition formation game is defined, where each UE is a player whose cost is identified as the content upload time. The solution of the game determines the stable feasible partition for the UEs in the cell. We demonstrate through simulations that with this solution the content uploading time is reduced by 52% with respect to the traditional cellular mode.
The reference scenario in this paper is a single cell in a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) s... more The reference scenario in this paper is a single cell in a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system, where multiple user equipments (UEs) aim at uploading some data to a central server or to the Cloud. The traditional uploading tech- nique used in cellular systems, i.e., with separate links from each UE to the eNodeB, is compared to innovative relay-based schemes that exploit Device-to-Device (D2D) communications between two (or more) UEs in proximity to each other. Differences in the channel quality experienced by the UEs offer an opportunity to develop D2D-based solutions, where (i) the UE with a poor direct link to the eNodeB will forward data to a nearby UE over a high-quality D2D link; and (ii) the receiving UE then uploads its own generated data and the relayed data to the eNodeB over a good uplink channel. A straightforward gain in the data uploading time can be obtained for the first UE. To extend the benefits, also to the relaying UE, enhanced D2D-based solutions are proposed that decrease the uploading time of this UE based on the cooperative sharing of the resources allocated by the eNodeB to the cooperating devices. Finally, preliminary results are also presented for a multihop study case, where a chain of devices exploits D2D communications to upload data to the eNodeB.
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Papers by Antonino Orsino
of the 5G systems, namely Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. The potential
of D2D communications paradigm holding the promise to overcome the limitations
of conventional cellular systems with very high bit rates, low delay, and low power
consumption is illustrated. D2D communications can be especially useful in a num-
ber of applications where devices are in close proximity and significant improve-
ments can be obtained. However, there are many issues still waiting for a solution
before a widespread use of D2D communications in next 5G systems is granted.
Moreover, some research aspects received little attention so far. Starting from an
overview of D2D communications technology, this chapter will browse through all
these aspects, with a view on the standardization process, the challenges and the
open issues.