These are some of the subjects i have made research on, either for academic purposes or seminars.
This was my master thesis work: studying and deploying a route planning algorithm for electric vehicles, which takes into account the vehicle's energy consumption and presence of charging stations. The algorithm's main goal is to help the drivers to cope with the low battery autonomy of most models and lack of charging infrastructures. The algorithm is implemented on a Node.js web application.
This work is part of the Internet of Energy project, which aims to provide a network infrastructure based on standard and interoperable communication protocols that interconnect the energy network with the Internet.
This survey is about Bitcoin, mainly focused on the software architecture of Bitcoin peer-to-peer clients. Other than reviewing the key features and pros and cons of Bitcoin clients, the survey discusses the security and anonimity concerns of the Bitcoin network, presenting a couple alternatives to this crypto-currency.
This study is also supported by the development of a Bitcoin network simulator: nodes and transactions between them, building a longer and longer block-chain and occasionally trying to exploit the weaknesses of the system, allowing to observe the reactions of the network.
The term smart grid refers to a modern power grid which, with the addition of information technologies, grants higher efficiency and reliability. Main components of a smart grid are smart meters: electronic devices capable of recording electrical consumption (or gas and water) of a building, such as an home or industrial facility, and communicate it to the utility, along with other information. When the communication between smart meters and the utility can be bidirectional, allowing for more advanced functionalities, we have an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Of course, speed and reliability of the used communication channels is the key for a correct functioning of the whole infrastructure. In this seminars are discussed some aspects of the wireless technologies used within those systems.
Seminar regarding mobile devices and the emerging paradigm of Cloud Computing. The following abstract is extracted from Doug Terry's annotated bibliography:
Increasingly, the clients of cloud-based services are not desktop PCs but rather mobile devices, such as cell phones and portable media players. How do mobile devices at the edge of the network interact with cloud-based services to effectively manage data and computation on behalf of users? How does a user's location factor into the design of cloud-based services?
This elementary operating system was the project for my Operating Systems class, on the second year of my degree in computer science. It consisted of two phases, structured as different abstraction layers:
The OS runs on the uMPS2 architecture/emulator.
This project is based on the study and the extension of previous works, referenced in the report, on the subject.
Considering how mobility of devices and noise affects wireless communications, especially on higher layers protocols (i.e. TCP), a system allowing to retransmit data segments faster when a loss is detected on lower layers would speed up data exchange.
Two ways of doing this are considered:
This was my bachelor thesis work: deploying a sensor network capable of collecting environmental data (such as temperature, humidity, pressure, illuminance, ...) and broadcast them over a Wifi network; a context-aware application on an Android device would listen for these information, display them to the user and eventually react autonomously by launching other applications.
The sensor network is formed by Arduino microcontrollers, connected through XBee radio modules (here's a link to the code to upload on the boards). The sensor network has a star topology: information are collected by the end devices and sent to the one coordinator, which broadcasts them through his second interface (Ethernet in this case, connected to an access point) as the payload of an UDP datagram.
The context-aware application can be downloaded from the Android section.
A brief seminar on the usage of XBee RF modules, built on the stack of protocols defined by 802.15.4/Zigbee, to deploy low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN).