Research
The research activities of this area can be categorised in three main threads, one focusing on cognitive and access technologies with application in the Internet of Things domain, one on the control and management of communication resources and one taking a more end to end perspective on communication services and considering energy efficient datacenter resources management.
Going into deeper detail, in the first thread covers co-existence and interoperability issues that currently prevent integrated usage of heterogeneous access technologies. Our main expertise revolves around the use of Ultra-Wide-Band both as a sensing technology and as an opportunistic and "cognitive" broadband access technology. This approach brings the ability to dynamically shape spectrum usage around the bands available at a given location. Our research on UWB as a sensing technology has also the objective of promoting an energy-efficient use of access technologies, thus maximizing battery duration for portable devices. Beyond UWB the group expertise also extends to the area of satellite communications.
In the second thread the activity focus mainly on the optimisation of optical transport resource usage with increasing attention to novel communication infrastructure sharing paradigms. Taking a system perspective, and with the aid of emulations and simulations, our research aims to develop effective control and management planes in order to facilitate the design, planning and control of existing communication systems. The part of this set of activities related to optical transport is at a mature stage and in the process of making its way to standards and vendors' equipment through collaboration with our industrial partners.
In the last thread of research we take a software oriented look at how to ensure service delivery quality through the control and management of both communication and computing resources. Therefore our research is mainly oriented towards the use of data management and self-learning techniques to fulfill the objectives of various application and service delivery scenarios. Extended knowledge in data management, monitoring and live data-stream processing is used, for example, in support of energy efficient solutions which do not compromise the overall quality and service delivery. Such methods are applied in the management of computing resources in data centres as well as in SmartGrid and virtual utilities related initiatives.
Contact
Raffaele Giaffreda