Teaching Activity

 

Available MS Theses

  • Green Internet and Sustainable Computing
  • Several reports indicate that the total energy consumed by people connecting to the Internet to carry out their daily activities is already very high, and is expected to increase in the near future as the Internet's role in the society expands. About 74 TeraWatt hours (TWh) per year of electricity are consumed by the Internet. It is estimated that about 32% of this energy could be saved just by using power management techniques on Internet devices. Researchers are tending to direct their attention to the network edges (i.e., data centers and PCs) since there is less room for energy savings inside the Internet core. It is particularly relevant to focus on PCs, as these devices are widespread and numerous. The activity will thus address the design of efficient solutions to achieve large energy savings (by switching off PCs, when idle) without degrading the Quality of Service perceived by the user. Reference applications will be P2P file-sharing applications (like BitTorrent). This activity will be carried out in the framework of the European COST Action IC-0804 (Energy-Efficiency in Large-scale Distributed Systems).

  • Mobile Sensor Networks for New People-centric Applications
    Modern mobile phones (like the I-phone) include a number of sensors ( e.g., accelorometers, GPS, cameras, microphones). At the same time, sensors are installed in urban environments to support environmental sensing applications, such as real-time monitoring of air-quality, weather conditions, and traffic conditions. This global mobile sensor network introduces a new people-centric sensing paradigm and paves the way to new applications based on data sensed by a large number of people. At the same time, it requires new protocols for efficient data gathering, storage, delivery, and exploitation. The activity will thus be targeted to design and evaluate efficient protocols to enable the new people-centric sensing paradigm.

  • Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Applications
    In recent years, the number of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments for real-life applications has rapidly increased. In the industrial field WSNs are currently used for factory automation, distributed and process control, and remote monitoring of industrial machinery and equipments. And, based on recent studies, their utilization is expected to increase more and more in the next years, especially in the fields of logistics, automation and control. This positive trend should also be favored by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard (covering the physical and MAC layers) and ZigBee specifications (covering network and application layers). Recent studies have highlighted that the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol suffers a serious unreliability problem, when power management is enabled, that could compromise the correct application's behavior. The activity will be aimed at devising solutions for 802.15.4/ZigBee WSNs to ensure the reliability level required by the application with the minimum energy expenditure. This activity will be carried out in the framework of the PRIN project Wireless Sensor Networks for Dependable Monitoring of Critical Applications (WiSe DeMon)