Romano Fantacci - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Romano Fantacci

Publication in the conference proceedings of EUSIPCO, Rhodes, Greece, 1998

Future Internet, 2021

The creation of the future quantum Internet requires the development of new systems, architecture... more The creation of the future quantum Internet requires the development of new systems, architectures, and communications protocols. As a matter of fact, the optical fiber technology is affected by extremely high losses; thus, the deployment of a quantum satellite network (QSN) composed of quantum satellite repeaters (QSRs) in low Earth orbit would make it possible to overcome these attenuation problems. For these reasons, we consider the design of an ad hoc quantum satellite backbone based on the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm with a modular two-tier Control Plane (CP). The first tier of the CP is embedded into a Master Control Station (MCS) on the ground, which coordinates the entire constellation and performs the management of the CP integrated into the constellation itself. This second tier is responsible for entanglement generation and management on the selected path. In addition to defining the SDN architecture in all its components, we present a possible protocol to ...

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2019

Securing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and protecting their applications from privacy leaks is... more Securing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and protecting their applications from privacy leaks is a challenge, due to their weak (computational and storage) capabilities, and their proximity with sensitive data. Considering the resourceconstrains of such devices, their long lifetime, and the intermittent connections, classical security approaches are often too difficult or impractical to apply. Moving Target Defense is an established technique whose goal is to lower the attack surface to malicious users by constantly modifying device footprint. Changing the address to an IoT device without privacy leaks is, however, a nontrivial task. In this paper, we propose a novel method to perform a network-wide (IP and MAC) address shuffling procedure, called Address Shuffling Algorithm with HMAC (AShA), which is simple to implement, and whose network overhead is minimal. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we analyze our approach via theoretical analysis and simulations. Our analysis shows how AShA parameters can be adapted to various network sizes while our simulations results show how AShA can be used to successfully perform a global collision-free address renewal on networks of more than 2000 nodes using 16-bit addresses.

International Conference on Computer Communications, Apr 7, 1991

A multibeam fast packet switching satellite communication network serving multiple zones is studi... more A multibeam fast packet switching satellite communication network serving multiple zones is studied in this paper. The synchronous Time Division Multiple Access protocol (TDM) is use in transmitting messages in the uplink channels while the Asinchronous Time Division Multiple Access protocol (ATDM) is used in the downlink channels. Moreover, fast packet switching capabilities are assumed on-board the satellite. Alternatives for the architecture of the on-board fast packet switching fabric are considered. The perjormance of the considered approaches have been derived by theoretical analysis and computer simulations. A novel input queueing technique is also proposed and analyzed to show that it achives betterperformance with respect to the classical input queueing approach. Therefore, by means of the novel input queueing approach it is possible to lower the end-to-end delay without increasing the complexity of the on-board equipmnts. Work carried out under thefinancial suppofl of the National Research Council (C.N. R.) in the frame of the Telecommunication Project. packets attained switching while queueing is required for the other to wait for a later route.

2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2009

Kademlia is a Distributed hash table widely used in P2P networks that has been applied to commerc... more Kademlia is a Distributed hash table widely used in P2P networks that has been applied to commercial and non commercial distribution of files. In this paper the authors review some security issues connected with Kademlia and propose a novel technique to leverage its security using an external certification service.

Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly, 2009

This paper deals with a communication infrastructure needed to allow a swarm of robots performing... more This paper deals with a communication infrastructure needed to allow a swarm of robots performing dust cleaning and garbage collection task in an urban area. It outlines the required communication links, analyses them regarding security, describes in details the implementation and figure out some performance test results.

Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042)

The approach presented in this paper aims to obtain a QoS for IPv6 protocol over LEO satellites. ... more The approach presented in this paper aims to obtain a QoS for IPv6 protocol over LEO satellites. Most of the switching and access operations in the proposed system will require the intelligent functions to be located on earth. We can allocate links at different bit-rates and no particular assumptions have been made as concerns the access protocol in order to maintain the presented work at a general level. Both Controlled Load and Not-Controlled Load traffic have been considered. The behavior of the proposed system shows that the utilization and the delays are strictly related. The simulations show that large delays correspond to small values of utilization while short delays have the drawbacks of bandwidth waste. Results point out that, as concerns the privileged traffic classes of NCL are subject to delays very close to those obtained by the CL traffic while maintaining high link utilizations.

IEEE GLOBECOM 2007-2007 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2007

This paper deals with the problem of supporting sink mobility in a wireless sensor network. It fo... more This paper deals with the problem of supporting sink mobility in a wireless sensor network. It focuses on a specific scenario, where mobile nodes act themselves as both end-users, when querying the WSN for specific information, and as sinks, when gathering the queried data. Due to the mobility of users and to the topology of the network, sinks experience frequent disconnections from the WSN. A system architecture, and the related protocols, capable of supporting the envisioned application domain has been proposed. The performance of the proposed system architecture has been evaluated by means of simulative studies, together with addressing the impact of mobility, deployment geometry and routing parameters.

IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2006

Wireless networks that support client mobility have to face the challenge of providing a secure, ... more Wireless networks that support client mobility have to face the challenge of providing a secure, performant handoff between different access points. IEEE 802.1X [1] model provides a secure mechanism used by many standard protocols to securely generate keying material between two peer hosts when one of the two is accessing the network for first time, but that is hardly usable for reauthentication during handoff procedures without loss of performance. This paper deals with the proposal of a novel scheme to transport authentication credentials during handoff that uses a two-way only exchange with the backend authentication server maintaining the security of the system. As a high-level method it can be applied to different types of network, such as IEEE 802.11i [2] infrastructure or ad-hoc mode networks in a mesh environment.

Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech., 2013

Meeting citizens' requirements economically and efficiently is the most important objective of Sm... more Meeting citizens' requirements economically and efficiently is the most important objective of Smart Cities. As a matter of fact, they are considered a key concept both for future Internet and ICT. It is expected that a wide range of services will be made available for residential users (e.g.: intelligent transportation systems, e-government, e-banking, e-commerce, smart management of energy demand, etc.), public administration entities, public safety and civil protection agencies, etc. with increased quality, lower costs and reduced environmental impact. In order to achieve these ambitious objectives, new technologies should be developed such as non-invasive sensing, highly parallel processing, smart grids and mobile broadband communications. This paper considers the communication aspects of Smart City applications, specifically, the role of the latest developments of LTE-A standard, which forecast the increase of broadband coverage by means of small cells. We shall demonstrate that the novel concept of small cell fully meets the emerging communication and networking requirements of future Smart Cities. To this aim, a feasible network architecture for future Smart Cities, based on small cells, will be discussed in the framework of a future smarter and user-centric perspective of forthcoming 4G mobile technologies.

2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2007

This paper analyzes some critical security issues in the family of IEEE 802.16 standard that has ... more This paper analyzes some critical security issues in the family of IEEE 802.16 standard that has not been addressed so far. In particular two of the key features of the standard, the dynamic resources allocation and the mesh mode revealed to be vulnerable to attacks that represent serious threats to the robustness and privacy of the communications. In the first case the attacker is able to reduce bandwidth assigned to its neighbors, with the aim of obtaining more resources for himself; in the second case, we observed that there might be no real privacy in communications between two nodes of the mesh network. These vulnerabilities are still present even after the latest amendment to the standard, IEEE 802.16e that solved some previously addressed security flaws.

2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference GLOBECOM 2010, 2010

The interest towards real-time computing has lead an even more interest in grid computing. While ... more The interest towards real-time computing has lead an even more interest in grid computing. While in the past the implementation of grid computing has been done on high performance computers, in the recent years there is an increasing interest in the pervasive grid scenarios, where multiple devices can be used for a distributed computing. The most challenging idea is to use mobile devices connected among them with wireless connections for setting up pervasive grid environments. In this context, it is a crucial problem the optimization of the routing algorithms among the processing nodes, in order to satisfy the performance requirements of a distributed computing. Aim of this paper is the design of specific routing algorithms for different pervasive grid applications with a particular attention to time sensitive scenarios.

Future Generations

Network coding (NC) is a promising technique recently proposed to improve network performance in ... more Network coding (NC) is a promising technique recently proposed to improve network performance in terms of maximum throughput, minimum delivery delay, and energy consumption. The original proposal highlighted the advantages of NC for multicast communications in wire-line networks. Recently, network coding has been considered as an efficient approach to improve performance in wireless networks, mainly in terms of data reliability and lower energy consumption, especially for broadcast communications. The basic idea of NC is to remove the typical requirement that different information flows have to be processed and transmitted independently through the network. When NC is applied, intermediate nodes in the network do not simply relay the received packets, but they combine several received packets before transmission. As a consequence, the output flow at a given node is obtained as a linear combination of its input flows. This chapter deals with the application of network coding principl...

Sensors, 2011

The interest in monitoring applications using underwater sensor networks has been growing in rece... more The interest in monitoring applications using underwater sensor networks has been growing in recent years. The severe communication restrictions imposed by underwater channels make that efficient monitoring be a challenging task. Though a lot of research has been conducted on underwater sensor networks, there are only few concrete applications to a real-world case study. In this work, hence, we propose a general three tier architecture leveraging low cost wireless technologies for acoustic communications between underwater sensors and standard technologies, Zigbee and Wireless Fidelity (WiFi), for water surface communications. We have selected a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, after making a comparison with some common MAC protocols. Thus the performance of the overall system in terms of Signals Discarding Rate (SDR), signalling delay at the surface gateway as well as the percentage of true detection have been evaluated by simulation, pointing out good results which give evidence in applicability's favour.

International Journal of Satellite Communications, 1997

Future mobile communication systems will be characterized by the interworking of several networks... more Future mobile communication systems will be characterized by the interworking of several networks that will be integrated into a unique system. The satellite component and the terrestrial one will use as far as possible the same protocols. This work is concerned with Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. In particular, Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) has been considered as a good candidate for terrestrial cellular systems, since it allows high multiplexing gains, dynamic PRMA carrier allocation to cells, easy management of integrated voice and data traffic and a near-transparent behaviour with respect to user mobility. The main aim of this preliminary work is to investigate the suitability of the PRMA protocol for application to Low Earth Orbit Mobile Satellite Systems (LEO-MSSs). Moreover, we have proposed a novel version of the PRMA protocol, named PRMA with Hindering States (PRMA-HS), that is particularly suitable for application in LEO systems. This new technique has shown very promising results in terms of both packet dropping probability and throughput.

IEE Proceedings - Communications, 1996

Different dynamic channel allocation (DCA) approaches based on the evaluation of a cost function ... more Different dynamic channel allocation (DCA) approaches based on the evaluation of a cost function are proposedl. The scenario considered is low earth orbit :and geostationary orbit mobile satellite systcnis. A suitable user mobility model has bcen defined to generate interbeam handover requests. Different alternatives to manage interbeaim handovers have been investigated. Among them, the most promising sohtion seems to be the queuing of handover requests. The quality of service parameters 1.hat have been considered are: blocking probability for new call arrivals, handover failure probability arid the probability of incompletcly served call owing to the initial blocking or to the failure of a subsequent handover request. Comparisons among the proposed DCA techniques and the fixed channel allocation technique have been (carried out to find a solution 1.hat represents a good trade-off between the blocking performance and the required signalling load.

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 1998

It is anticipated that the satellite component of the future universal mobile telecommunications ... more It is anticipated that the satellite component of the future universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) will be based (partly or totally) on non-GEOstationary (non-GEO) constellations of satellites to serve mixed populations of users, each category being treated through different contracts stipulating different quality of service (QoS). In particular, we envisage a high-quality premium service which guarantees the success of each handover procedure, called guaranteed handover (GH) service, and a low-cost lower quality service called regular service, where handover failures are accepted provided that the probability of a call being unsuccessful does not exceed a given value. This paper proposes a strategy which eliminates forced call terminations due to handover failures, thus allowing the GH service. This procedure applies to low earth orbit (LEO) constellations using the satellite-fixed cell technique. An analytical model has been derived to calculate QoS parameters for a mixed population of GH and regular users. Providing both GH service to some users and regular service to other users requires an increased satellite capacity with respect to the case where all the users are served with the regular service; this capacity increase has been evaluated as a function of the percentage of GH users, the traffic load per cell, and the considered satellite mobility environment. The GH approach has been validated through the comparison with another scheme which envisages the queuing of handover requests for privileged users.

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 1996

The interest in global spectrum allocation techniques is growing with the always increasing spect... more The interest in global spectrum allocation techniques is growing with the always increasing spectrum demand for mobile communications. This paper deals with a Dynamic Channel Allocation @.CA.) technique based on an energy function whose minimization can be performed by a Hopfield Neural Network. The performance of the proposed DCA technique is here derived by computer simulations. Comparisons with a

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 1992

The new generation of "user-oriented'' satellites are conceived to involve a dramatic reduction i... more The new generation of "user-oriented'' satellites are conceived to involve a dramatic reduction in the earth station size and complexity. Frequency division multiple access (FDMA) and single channel per carrier (SCPC) in the uplink and time division multiplexing (TDM) in the downlink are employed in the system described here. To interface FDMA in the uplink and TDM in the downlink, multicarrier demodulation (MCD) is required on-board the satellite. The operation of the on-board MCD is the separation of each individual channel and subsequent demodulation. The results presented in this paper have been obtained under INTELSAT Contract INTEL-479, which has provided an analysis of the advanced technologies and techniques for on-board frequency demultiplexing and demodulation for low bit rate carriers. The study was constrained by the requirement that new-generation payloads could serve the stations already active in the INTELSAT Business System. A digital hardware design that implements an MCD that can process three channels at 4.4 Mb/s, or 12 channels at 1.1 Mb/s is described in this paper. The test results have confirmed the MCD feasibility, and further improvements are expected from a semicustom implementation.

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 1995