Telematics Lab

The research team belonging to the Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari deals with the design, the investigation, and the optimization of ICT solutions for emerging and pioneering applications domains. Several activities are financed by research projects and carried out in cooperation of other Italian and/or foreign research teams. Currently, the main research interests include:

5G, B5G, and 6G communication systems. The 5th Generation of mobile networks and beyond communication systems, namely 5G/B5G/6G, target the ambitious goal to support a very heterogeneous mixture of services having specific and challenging requirements. To this end, they should integrate and properly harmonize heterogeneous technical components, services, and network functions, deployed at different level of the overall (virtualized) infrastructure. By leveraging the large experience on mobile networks matured in the past, the Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari is involved in several research activities related to 5G/B5G/6G, which include i) the investigation of advanced transmission techniques based on Massive MIMO and Non Orthogonal Multiple Access, ii) the design and the evaluation of flexible and optimized resource (including radio, computing, communication, and virtual resources) allocation mechanisms fulfilling the quality of service requirements related to a mixture of heterogeneous services, iii) the integration of standardized technologies for broadcast and multicast services and NB-IoT, iv) the definition of elastic and flexible 5G/B5G architectures and services based on machine learning, deep machine learning, and deep reinforcement learning, network slicing, Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, and Mobile Edge Computing paradigms, and v) the development of both analytical models and simulation tools useful to test and evaluate the performance analysis of 5G/B5G/6G protocols and architectures.

Internet of Drones. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are an important enabler for 5G and 6G communications and can be employed for a wide range of applications. Drones can fly in swarms, continuously optimizing their trajectory, and coordinate among themselves, thus delivering value-added services in many applications, including goods delivery, environmental surveying, first-aid units   in disruptive events, and Flying Base Stations in 5G and Beyond scenarios with multiple   users requesting connectivity at the same time in the same area. Recently, the scientific   community considered the possibility to equip Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Intelligent Reconfigurable Surfaces   which are composed by passive elements that can reflect and shift the incident electromagnetic   wave by a programmable phase. Research activities on the Internet of Drones context include the design and assessment of different channel models and the optimization of the entire   mission plan, spanning from the trajectory to the communication outage probability.  

Advanced communication architectures based on quantum technology. Quantum computing (QC) represents a promising technology that can speed up computation, by several orders of magnitude, with respect to classical systems. For this reason, it can be also considered as a key technology to enhance the network intelligence capabilities in 6G and B6G systems. In this context, the research activities of Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari focus on identifying design principles for QC-aided network intelligence and QC-aided telecommunication architectures and illustrates the related emerging research challenges. In addition, they are also investigating the possibility to solve optimization problems by means of QC. In fact, several telecommunications-related problems are NP-hard such as scheduling for radio access networks, which belongs to the class of combinatorial problem.

Cybersecurity in emerging communication systems. The growing availability of communication infrastructures, computing paradigms and software architectures implementing distributed multi-domain value chains requires new paradigms aiming to fulfill the main security issues, i.e., mutual trustworthiness of entities in partially unknown topologies, identification and mitigation of advanced threats, identity management and access control, management, and propagation of sensitive data. To this end, the Telematics Laboratory Politecnico di Bari is involved in research activities on the design and implementation of heterogeneous security services (including flexible and fine-grained authentication and authorization services) for distributed systems that combine digital resources and components from multiple domains. Such architectures are investigated also in Social Internet of Things (SIoT) scenarios, where research efforts are focused on multi-layered SIoT architectures and theoretical models for service provision with trustworthiness guarantees. In parallel, optimization algorithms are currently under development for the dynamic allocation of virtualized security services in hybrid 6G-satellite scenarios.

Secure Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. Billions of objects are being to be shattered almost everywhere to enable smart services in different application domains, such as health care, logistics, energy management, military, environmental monitoring, and industry automation (just to name a few). Thus, it is important to design effective, flexible, energy-efficient, lightweight, distributed, and secure communication architectures. In this context, research activities of Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari mainly focus on wireless sensor networks, channel access protocols, routing protocols, energy harvesting architectures, well as real time communication architectures in industrial environments and middleware for machine-to-machine systems. Security is also vital in both Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things. Here, several research efforts are devoted to the definition and the implementation of distributed security architectures offering, also in federated and multi-authority scenarios, decoupled authentication, and privacy-oriented authorization (i.e., Attribute-Based Access Control with ephemeral user identities) services, lightweight key agreement mechanisms, blockchain-enabled solutions, and flexible architectures providing dynamic and adaptable confidentiality requirements.

Datacentric and programmable architectures for the Future Internet. The emerging Information-Centric Networking paradigm recently gained worldwide the attention of academia and industrial research communities, thanks to its inherent ability to support upcoming technologies and services beyond the current host-centric Internet rationale. Research activities in this context include the design of innovative methodologies and communication architectures for multimedia, transportation, smart city, and Internet of Things services, the investigation of publish-subscribe communication strategies supporting the mobility of both consumers and producers, the design and the optimization of routing protocols, and the development of analytical models for the analysis of the performance of data-centric communication protocols and architectures. Future Internet is also going to be flexibly configurable, while hosting virtualized components and functions. In this context, the Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari studies advanced network architecture strongly grounded on both Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization paradigms, as well as their integration with Information-Centric Networking, Internet of Things, and optical networks.

Nanonetworks. The innovation process triggered by nanotechnologies is fostering the development of integrated devices with size ranging from one to few hundred of nanometers, very well suited for ICT, biomedical, industrial, and military applications. Here, the research activities include the characterization of different communication techniques for the nanoscale (including the exchange of electromagnetic waves in the Terahertz band and molecular diffusion), the design of energy harvesting, optimized, and low-complex communication protocols and network architectures, and the development of both analytical models and simulation tools to be used for evaluating the performance of nanoscale communication systems, based on reference standards (like IEEE 1906.1).

Internet models and network measurements. The characterization of complex and interconnected systems, such as the Internet, is essential to obtain precious insights on the network behavior. In this case, Telematics Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari carried out interesting research activities aiming at formulating analytical models for key aspects of Internet topology (for instance, diameter and shortest path). Network measurements are also fundamental for deeply understanding network behavior, type of traffic managed by an operator, thus being able to conceive innovative solutions improving system performance. Research activities related to network measurements include packet sampling techniques for scalable measurement systems in the Internet network, active and passive measurements for the analysis of mobile networks, and machine learning techniques for traffic classification and optimal resource management.