Learning from Errors: Detecting ZigBee Interference in WiFi Networks

In this work we show how to detect ZigBee interference on commodity WiFi cards by monitoring the reception errors, such as synchronization errors, invalid header formats, too long frames, etc., caused by ZigBee transmissions. Indeed, in presence of non-WiFi modulated signals, the occurrence of these types of errors follows statistics that can be easily recognized. Moreover, the duration of the error bursts depends on the transmission interval of the interference source, while the error spacing depends on the receiver implementation. On the basis of these considerations, we propose the adoption of hidden Markov chains for characterizing the behavior of WiFi receivers in presence of controlle…

Impact of Spreading Factor Imperfect Orthogonality in LoRa Communications

In this paper we study the impact of imperfect-orthogonality in LoRa spreading factors (SFs) in simulation and real-world experiments. First, we analyze LoRa modulation numerically and show that collisions between packets of different SFs can indeed cause packet loss if the interference power received is strong enough. Second, we validate such findings using commercial devices, confirming our numerical results. Third, we modified and extended LoRaSim, an open-source LoRa simulator, to measure the impact of inter-SF collisions and fading (which was not taken into account previously in the simulator). Our results show that non-orthogonality of the SFs can deteriorate significantly the perform…

FLUMO: FLexible Underwater MOdem

The last years have seen a growing interest in underwater acoustic communications because of its applications in marine research, oceanography, marine commercial operations, the offshore oil industry and defense. High-speed communication in the underwater acoustic channel has been challenging because of limited bandwidth, extended multipath, refractive properties of the medium, severe fading, rapid time variation and large Doppler shifts. In this paper, we show an implementation of a flexible Software-Defined Acoustic (SDA) underwater modem, where modulation parameters are completely tunable to optimize performance. In particular, we develop the system architecture following two key ideas. …

Performance of LoRa technology: link-level and cell-level performance

Abstract LoRa is a chirp spread spectrum technology that is becoming very popular for low-power wide-area networks, with high-density devices. In this chapter, we study the capacity of LoRa in rejecting different interfering signals. First, we analyze LoRa modulation numerically demonstrating that channel captures appear easily and that collisions between packets modulated with different spreading factors (SFs) are not uncommon. We validate such findings in experiments based on commercial devices and software-defined radios. Second, we model the network capacity obtainable in a typical LoRa cell: we show that high SFs can be seriously influenced by inter-SF collisions and that fading has a …

Learning From Errors: Detecting Cross-Technology Interference in WiFi Networks

In this paper, we show that inter-technology interference can be recognized using commodity WiFi devices by monitoring the statistics of receiver errors. Indeed, while for WiFi standard frames the error probability varies during the frame reception in different frame fields (PHY, MAC headers, and payloads) protected with heterogeneous coding, errors may appear randomly at any point during the time the demodulator is trying to receive an exogenous interfering signal. We thus detect and identify cross-technology interference on off-the-shelf WiFi cards by monitoring the sequence of receiver errors (bad PLCP, bad FCS, invalid headers, etc.) and propose two methods to recognize the source of in…

Largescale available bandwidth measurements: Shortcomings of current techniques

available bandwidth

Data fusion analysis applied to different climate change models: an application to the energy consumptions of a building office

The paper aims to achieve the modelling of climate change effects on heating and cooling in the building sector, through the use of the available Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted data. Data from several different climate models will be fused with regards to mean air temperature, wind speed and horizontal solar radiation. Several climatic models data were analyzed ranging from January 2006 to December 2100. Rather than considering each model in isolation, we propose a data fusion approach for providing a robust combined model for morphing an existing weather data file. The final aim is simulating future energy use for heating and cooling of a reference building as a conse…

Large-Scale Available Bandwidth Measurements: Interference in Current Techniques

The end-to-end available bandwidth of an Internet path is a desirable information that can be exploited to optimize system performance. Several tools have been proposed in the past to estimate it. However, existing measurement techniques were not designed for large-scale deployments. In this paper we show that current tools do not properly work where multiple probing processes share a portion of a path. We provide experimental evidence to quantify the impact of mutual interference between measurements. We further analyze the characteristics of popular tools, quantifying (i) the impact of mutual interference, (ii) the total overhead imposed to the network and (iii) the intrusiveness of the m…

Rings for Privacy: an Architecture for Large Scale Privacy-Preserving Data Mining

This article proposes a new architecture for privacy-preserving data mining based on Multi Party Computation (MPC) and secure sums. While traditional MPC approaches rely on a small number of aggregation peers replacing a centralized trusted entity, the current study puts forth a distributed solution that involves all data sources in the aggregation process, with the help of a single server for storing intermediate results. A large-scale scenario is examined and the possibility that data become inaccessible during the aggregation process is considered, a possibility that traditional schemes often neglect. Here, it is explicitly examined, as it might be provoked by intermittent network connec…

Capacity Estimation of ADSL links

Most tools designed to estimate the capacity of an Internet path require access on both end hosts of the path, which makes them difficult to deploy and use. In this paper we present a single-sided technique for measuring the capacity without the active cooperation of the destination host, focusing particularly on ADSL links. Compared to current methods used on broadband hosts, our approach generates two orders of magnitude less traffic and is much less intrusive. Our tool, DSLprobe, exploits the typical characteristics of ADSL, namely its bandwidth asymmetry and the relatively low absolute bandwidth, in order to measure both downlink and uplink capacities and to mitigate the impact of cross…

Demo

We present an innovative smartphone-centric tracking system for indoor and outdoor environments, based on the joint utilization of dead-reckoning and computer vision (CV) techniques. The system is explicitly designed for visually impaired people (although it could be easily generalized to other users) and it is built under the assumption that special reference signals, such as painted lines, colored tapes or tactile pavings are deployed in the environment for guiding visually impaired users along pre-defined paths. Thanks to highly optimized software, we are able to execute the CV and sensor-fusion algorithms in run-time on low power hardware such as a normal smartphone, precisely tracking …

DEMO: Unconventional WiFi-ZigBee communications without gateways

Nowadays, the overcrowding of ISM bands is becoming an evident limitation for the performance and widespread usage of 802.11 and 802.15.4 technologies. In this demo, we prove that it is possible to opportunistically exploit the inter-technology interference between 802.11 and 802.15.4 to build an unconventional low-rate communication channel and signalling protocol, devised to improve the performance of each contending technology. Differently from previous solutions, inter-technology communications do not require the deployment of a gateway with two network interfaces, but can be activated (when needed) directly between two heterogeneous nodes, e.g. a WiFi node and a ZigBee node. This capab…

A Channel-Aware Adaptive Modem for Underwater Acoustic Communications

Acoustic underwater channels are very challenging, because of limited bandwidth, long propagation delays, extended multipath, severe attenuation, rapid time variation and large Doppler shifts. A plethora of underwater communication techniques have been developed for dealing with such a complexity, mostly tailoring specific applications scenarios which can not be considered as one-size-fits-all solutions. Indeed, the design of environment-specific solutions is especially critical for modulations with high spectral efficiency, which are very sensitive to channel characteristics. In this paper, we design and implement a software-defined modem able to dynamically estimate the acoustic channel c…

Performance Analysis of Sweep-Spread Carrier (S2C) Modulation for Underwater Communications

In the last decades, underwater acoustic communications have seen a growing development with a variety of research as well as commercial applications, dealing with channel distortions, multipath and Doppler effects typical underwater channels. A very robust modulation able to guarantee connectivity in harsh environments (where spectral efficient solutions such as OFDM can be prevented) is the so called sweep-spread carrier (S2C) modulation, which is based on the usage of a linearly time-varying carrier. Underwater modems based on S2C modulations have been patented and successfully adopted in real-world deployments. In this paper, we analyze the performance of S2C both in simulation and infi…

A Navigation and Augmented Reality System for Visually Impaired People

In recent years, we have assisted with an impressive advance in augmented reality systems and computer vision algorithms, based on image processing and artificial intelligence. Thanks to these technologies, mainstream smartphones are able to estimate their own motion in 3D space with high accuracy. In this paper, we exploit such technologies to support the autonomous mobility of people with visual disabilities, identifying pre-defined virtual paths and providing context information, reducing the distance between the digital and real worlds. In particular, we present ARIANNA+, an extension of ARIANNA, a system explicitly designed for visually impaired people for indoor and outdoor localizati…

Experimental evaluation of privacy-preserving aggregation schemes on planetlab

New pervasive technologies often reveal many sen- sitive information about users’ habits, seriously compromising the privacy and sometimes even the personal security of people. To cope with this problem, researchers have developed the idea of privacy-preserving data mining which refers to the possibility of releasing aggregate information about the data provided by multiple users, without any information leakage about individual data. These techniques have different privacy levels and communication costs, but all of them can suffer when some users’ data becomes inaccessible during the operation of the privacy preserving protocols. It is thus interesting to validate the applicability of such…

Sensor Fusion Localization and Navigation for Visually Impaired People

In this paper, we present an innovative cyber physical system for indoor and outdoor localization and navigation, based on the joint utilization of dead-reckoning and computer vision techniques on a smartphone-centric tracking system. The system is explicitly designed for visually impaired people, but it can be easily generalized to other users, and it is built under the assumption that special reference signals, such as colored tapes, painted lines, or tactile paving, are deployed in the environment for guiding visually impaired users along pre-defined paths. Differently from previous works on localization, which are focused only on the utilization of inertial sensors integrated into the s…

Enhancing tracking performance in a smartphone-based navigation system for visually impaired people

In this paper we show how to enhance the tracking performance of Arianna, a low-cost augmented reality system designed to meet the needs of people with problems of orientation, people with sight impairment and blind people. For augmented reality system we mean the design of: i) a set of paths and tags to be deployed in the environment, realized in various ways depending on the context (decorative elements easily identifiable, colorful stripes, QR code, RFID, etc.); ii) an instrument of mediation between the reality and the user (typically a smartphone) to access the information disseminated in the environment by means of a camera and provide a vibration feedback signal to the users for foll…

The quest for bandwidth estimation techniques for large-scale distributed systems

In recent years the research community has developed many techniques to estimate the end-to-end available bandwidth of an Internet path. This important metric can be potentially exploited to optimize the performance of several distributed systems and, even, to improve the effectiveness of the congestion control mechanism of TCP. Thus, it has been suggested that some existing estimation techniques could be used for this purpose. However, existing tools were not designed for large-scale deployments and were mostly validated in controlled settings, considering only one measurement running at a time. In this paper, we argue that current tools, while offering good estimates when used alone, migh…

Privacy-Preserving Overgrid: Secure Data Collection for the Smart Grid

In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving scheme for Overgrid, a fully distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture designed to automatically control and implement distributed Demand Response (DR) schemes in a community of smart buildings with energy generation and storage capabilities. To monitor the power consumption of the buildings, while respecting the privacy of the users, we extend our previous Overgrid algorithms to provide privacy preserving data aggregation (PP-Overgrid). This new technique combines a distributed data aggregation scheme with the Secure Multi-Party Computation paradigm. First, we use the energy profiles of hundreds of buildings, classifying the amount of &ldquo

Data fusion analysis applied to different climate change models: An application to the energy consumptions of a building office

Abstract The paper aims to achieve the modelling of climate change effects on heating and cooling in the building sector, through the use of the available Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted data. Data from several different climate models will be fused with regards to mean air temperature, wind speed and horizontal solar radiation. Several climatic models data were analysed ranging from January 2006 to December 2100. Rather than considering each model in isolation, we propose a data fusion approach for providing a robust combined model for morphing an existing weather data file. The final aim is simulating future energy use for heating and cooling of a reference building a…

Non-cooperative available bandwidth estimation towards ADSL links

Existing tools for the estimation of the end- to-end available bandwidth require control of both end hosts of the path and this significantly limits their usability. In this paper we present ABwProbe, a single-ended tool for available bandwidth estimation against non-cooperative hosts. Although ABwProbe is general enough to be used on any Internet path, we focus our attention on ADSL links exploring the possibility of measuring the downlink available bandwidth of a non-cooperative ADSL host. We study the effect of cross-traffic on the uplink, finding that only large packets may deteriorate ABwProbe's measurements and we present two techniques to detect and filter the effect of uplink cross-…

Impact of LoRa Imperfect Orthogonality: Analysis of Link-Level Performance

In this letter, we focus on the evaluation of link-level performance of LoRa technology, in the usual network scenario with a central gateway and high-density deployment of end-devices. LoRa technology achieves wide coverage areas, low power consumption and robustness to interference thanks to a chirp spread-spectrum modulation, in which chirps modulated with different spreading factors (SFs) are quasi-orthogonal. We focus on the performance analysis of a single receiver in presence of collisions. First, we analyze LoRa modulation numerically and show that collisions between packets modulated with different SFs can indeed cause packet loss if the interference power received is strong enough…

LoRa Technology Demystified: From Link Behavior to Cell-Level Performance

In this paper we study the capability of LoRa technology in rejecting different interfering LoRa signals and the impact on the cell capacity. First, we analyze experimentally the link-level performance of LoRa and show that collisions between packets modulated with the same Spreading Factor (SF) usually lead to channel captures, while different spreading factors can indeed cause packet loss if the interference power is strong enough. Second, we model the effect of such findings to quantify the achievable capacity in a typical LoRa cell: we show that high SFs, generally seen as more robust, can be severely affected by inter-SF interference and that different criteria for deciding SF allocati…

A new approach to model the effect of climate change on the building sector: A climate models data fusion

Several climate models have been developed and used to forecast the effects of the climate changes, however the variability of results due to different models lead to a significant uncertainty on the estimation of the building energy use for the next century. In this context, the paper analyses this uncertainty and combines different climate models in order to improve the robustness of energy consumption predictions. The data of the climate models were then used to generate hourly weather files for the future period 2020-2099 and energy simulations for a case study located in Palermo (Italy) were performed. Results show a wide variability among all models (either alone or combined with our …

Performance of LoRa for Bike-Sharing Systems

Today bike sharing systems are becoming popular in many cities as short-distance transit vehicles. More than 18 million bicycles are available worldwide for public use and one of the main problems that afflicts such sharing systems is the loss of bikes, which can be stolen or simply left in unknown locations. Thus, many bikes are docked or tracked using GPS and costly cellular connections. In this paper, we consider the emerging Long Range (LoRa) technology for use in bike sharing systems. LoRa exploits free ISM bands and has been conceived for low power and low data rate applications. Additionally, LoRa is characterized by large cells and heterogeneous application domains, which may lead t…

An Indoor and Outdoor Navigation System for Visually Impaired People

In this paper, we present a system that allows visually impaired people to autonomously navigate in an unknown indoor and outdoor environment. The system, explicitly designed for low vision people, can be generalized to other users in an easy way. We assume that special landmarks are posed for helping the users in the localization of pre-defined paths. Our novel approach exploits the use of both the inertial sensors and the camera integrated into the smartphone as sensors. Such a navigation system can also provide direction estimates to the tracking system to the users. The success of out approach is proved both through experimental tests performed in controlled indoor environments and in r…

Interference Cancellation for LoRa Gateways and Impact on Network Capacity

In this paper we propose LoRaSyNc (LoRa receiver with SyNchronization and Cancellation), a second generation LoRa receiver that implements Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) and time synchronization to improve the performance of LoRa gateways. Indeed, the chirp spread spectrum modulation employed in LoRa experiences very high capture probability, and cancelling the strongest signal in case of collisions can significantly improve the cell capacity. An important feature of LoRaSyNc is the ability to track the frequency and clock drifts between the transmitter and receiver, during the whole demodulation of the interfered frame. Due to the use of low-cost oscillators on end-devices, a s…

A Survey on LoRa for Smart Agriculture: Current Trends and Future Perspectives

This paper provides a survey on the adoption of LoRa in the agricultural field, and reviews state-of-the-art solutions for Smart Agriculture, analyzing the potential of this technology in different infield applications. In particular, we consider four reference scenarios, namely irrigation systems, plantation and crop monitoring, tree monitoring, and livestock monitoring, which exhibit heterogeneous requirements in terms of network bandwidth, density, sensors’ complexity, and energy demand, as well as latency in the decision process. We discuss how LoRa-based solutions can work in these scenarios, analyzing their scalability, interoperability, network architecture, and energy-efficiency. Fi…

End-to-end Bandwidth Estimation in the Wide Internet

Error-Based Interference Detection in WiFi Networks

In this paper we show that inter-technology interference can be recognized by commodity WiFi devices by monitoring the statistics of receiver errors. Indeed, while for WiFi standard frames the error probability varies during the frame reception in different frame fields (PHY, MAC headers, payloads) protected with heterogeneous coding, errors may appear randomly at any point during the time the demodulator is trying to receive an exogenous interfering signal. We thus detect and identify cross-technology interference on off-the-shelf WiFi cards by monitoring the sequence of receiver errors (bad PLCP, bad PCS, invalid headers, etc.) and develop an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to recognize t…

Cross-Technology WiFi/ZigBee Communications: Dealing With Channel Insertions and Deletions

In this letter, we show how cross-technology interference can be exploited to set up a low-rate bidirectional communication channel between heterogeneous WiFi and ZigBee networks. Because of the environment noise and receivers' implementation, the cross-technology channel can be severely affected by insertions and deletions of symbols, whose effects need to be taken into account by the coding scheme and communication protocol.

Doppler Estimation and Correction for JANUS Underwater Communications

In recent years, underwater communications have seen a growing interest pushed by marine research, oceanography, marine commercial operations, offshore oil industry and defense applications. Generally, underwater communications employ audio signals which can propagate relatively far but are also significantly affected by Doppler distortions. In fact, physical properties of the water and spatial changes due to tides, currents and waves can cause channel variations or unwanted movements of the transmitter or receiver. This study shows how to compensate for the Doppler effect in transmission employing the JANUS standard, a popular modulation scheme for underwater communication. Differently for…

BusyBee: Low Rate WiFi-ZigBee Communications without Gateways

Nowadays, the overcrowding of ISM bands is becoming an evident limitation for the performance and widespread us- age of 802.11 and 802.15.4 technologies. In this demo, we prove that it is possible to opportunistically exploit the inter- technology interference between 802.11 and 802.15.4 to build an unconventional low-rate communication channel and sig- nalling protocol, devised to improve the performance of each contending technology. Differently from previous solutions, inter-technology communications do not require the deploy- ment of a gateway with two network interfaces, but can be activated (when needed) directly between two heterogeneous nodes, e.g. a WiFi node and a ZigBee node. Thi…

Fast Available Bandwidth sampling for ADSL links: rethinking the estimation for larger-scale measurements

Most existing tools for measuring the end-to-end available bandwidth require access to both end-hosts of the measured path, which severely restricts their usability. Few tools have been developed to overcome this limitation, but all of them focus on achieving high precision and are not suitable for large campaigns. In this paper we develop FAB-Probe , a tool aimed at characterizing the available bandwidth of a large number of paths, adapting it particularly for ADSL settings. FAB-Probe is an evolution of ABwProbe , a tool that estimates the available bandwidth in non-cooperative ADSL environments. Analyzing carefully the needs of such a characterization tool, we optimize and rethink ABwProb…

A decentralized load control architecture for smart energy consumption in small islands

Abstract In this paper we propose the adoption of Overgrid, a new decentralized load control architecture, for balancing the energy production variations introduced with the adoption of renewable sources, facilitating and improving the smart energy retrofit. The system is presented and applied for managing the aggregated daily load profile of a community of domestic end-users in the island of Lampedusa, Italy, exploiting the load profiles gathered in a real measurement campaign. The Overgrid Demand Response (DR) architecture is used for managing the residential flexible loads, estimating the aggregated power demand without any centralized server and creating a virtual “community” of smart b…

Overgrid: A Fully Distributed Demand Response Architecture Based on Overlay Networks

In this paper, we present Overgrid, a fully distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture designed to automatically control and implement distributed demand response (DR) schemes in a community of smart buildings with energy generation and storage capabilities. As overlay networks in communications establish logical links between peers regardless of the physical topology of the network, the Overgrid is able to apply some power balance criteria to its system of buildings, as they belong to a virtual microgrid, regardless of their physical location. We exploit an innovative distributed algorithm, called flow updating, for monitoring the power consumption of the buildings and the number of nodes…

Supporting Autonomous Navigation of Visually Impaired People for Experiencing Cultural Heritage

In this chapter, we present a system for indoor and outdoor localization and navigation to allow the low vision users in experiencing cultural heritage in autonomy. The system is based on the joint utilization of dead-reckoning and computer vision techniques on a smartphone-centric tracking system. The system is explicitly designed for visually impaired people, but it can be easily generalized to other users, and it is built under the assumption that special reference signals, such as colored tapes, painted lines, or tactile paving, are deployed in the environment for guiding visually impaired users along pre-defined paths. Differently from previous works on localization, which are focused …

Exploiting programmable architectures for WiFi/ZigBee inter-technology cooperation

The increasing complexity of wireless standards has shown that protocols cannot be designed once for all possible deployments, especially when unpredictable and mutating interference situations are present due to the coexistence of heterogeneous technologies. As such, flexibility and (re)programmability of wireless devices is crucial in the emerging scenarios of technology proliferation and unpredictable interference conditions. In this paper, we focus on the possibility to improve coexistence performance of WiFi and ZigBee networks by exploiting novel programmable architectures of wireless devices able to support run-time modifications of medium access operations. Differently from software…

ARIANNA: a smartphone-based navigation system with human in the loop

In this paper we present a low cost navigation system, called ARIANNA, primarily designed for visually impaired people. ARIANNA (pAth Recognition for Indoor Assisted NavigatioN with Augmented perception) permits to find some points of interests in an indoor environment by following a path painted or sticked on the floor. The path is detected by the camera of the smartphone which also generates a vibration signal providing a feedback to the user for correcting his/her direction. Some special landmarks can be deployed along the path for coding additional information detectable by the camera. In order to study the practical feasibility of the ARIANNA system for human users that want to follow …

ErrorSense: Characterizing WiFi Error Patterns for Detecting ZigBee Interference

Recent years have witnessed the increasing adoption of heterogeneous wireless networks working in unlicensed ISM bands, thus creating serious problems of spectrum overcrowding. Although ZigBee, Bluetooth and WiFi networks have been natively designed for working in presence of interference, it has been observed that several performance impairments may occur because of heterogeneous sensitivity to detect or react to the presence of other technologies. In this paper we focus on the WiFi capability to detect interfering ZigBee links. Despite of the narrowband transmissions performed by ZigBee, in emerging scenarios ZigBee interference can have a significant impact on WiFi performance. Therefore…

A cultural heritage experience for visually impaired people

Abstract In recent years, we have assisted to an impressive advance of computer vision algorithms, based on image processing and artificial intelligence. Among the many applications of computer vision, in this paper we investigate on the potential impact for enhancing the cultural and physical accessibility of cultural heritage sites. By using a common smartphone as a mediation instrument with the environment, we demonstrate how convolutional networks can be trained for recognizing monuments in the surroundings of the users, thus enabling the possibility of accessing contents associated to the monument itself, or new forms of fruition for visually impaired people. Moreover, computer vision …