The Fifth Generation of Mobile Communications (5G) will lead to the growth of use cases demanding higher capacity and a enhanced data rate, a lower latency, and a more flexible and scalable network able to offer better user Quality of Experience (QoE). The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of these use cases. It has been spreading in the recent past few years, and it covers a wider range of possible application scenarios, such as smart city, smart factory, and smart agriculture, among many others. However, the limitations of the terrestrial network hinder the deployment of IoT devices and services. Besides, the existence of a plethora of different solutions (short vs. long range, commercialized vs. standardized, etc.), each of them based on different communication protocols and, in some cases, on different access infrastructures, makes the integration among them and with the upcoming 5G infrastructure more difficult. This paper discusses the huge set of IoT solutions available or still under standardization that will need to be integrated in the 5G framework. UAVs and satellites will be proposed as possible solutions to ease this integration, overcoming the limitations of the terrestrial infrastructure, such as the limited covered areas and the densification of the number of IoT devices per square kilometer.

Summary: The space environment is still challenging but is becoming more and more attractive for an increasing number of entities. In the second half of the 20th century, a huge amount of funds was required to build satellites and gain access to space. Nowadays, it is no longer so. The advancement of technologies allows producing very small hardware components able to survive the strict conditions of the outer space. Consequently, small satellites can be designed for a wide set of missions keeping low design times, production costs, and deployment costs. One widely used type of small satellite is the CubeSat, whose different aspects are surveyed in the following: mission goals, hardware subsystems and components, possible network topologies, channel models, and suitable communication protocols. We also show some future challenges related to the employment of CubeSat networks.

This paper presents a novel network architecture for an integrated nanosatellite (nSAT)-5G system operating in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) domain. The architecture is realized adopting a delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) approach allowing end users to adopt standard devices. A buffer aware contact graph routing algorithm is designed to account for the buffer occupancy of the nSATs and for the connection planning derived from their visibility periods. At the terrestrial uplink, a coded random access is employed to realize a high-capacity interface for the typically irregular traffic of 5G users, while, at the space uplink, the DTN architecture is combined with the contention resolution diversity slotted Aloha protocol to match the recent update of the DVB-RCS2 standard. To achieve a reliable testing of the introduced functionalities, an accurate analysis of the statistic of the signal to interference-plus-noise ratio and of the capture probability at each mmWave link is developed by including interference, shadowing, fading, and noise. The application of the designed architecture to data transfer services in conjunction with possible delay reduction strategies, and an extension to inter-satellite communication, are finally presented by estimating the resulting loss/delay performance through a discrete-time discrete-event platform based on the integration of Matlab with Network Simulator 3.

The way of generating and distributing energy throughout the electrical grid to all users is evolving. The concept of Smart Grid (SG) took place to enhance the management of the electrical grid infrastructure and its functionalities from the traditional system to an improved one. To measure the energy consumption of the users is one of these functionalities that, in some countries, has already evolved from a periodical manual consumption reading to a more frequent and automatic one, leading to the concept of Smart Metering (SM). Technology improvement could be applied to the SM systems to allow, on one hand, a more efficient way to collect the energy consumption data of each user, and, on the other hand, a better distribution of the available energy through the infrastructure. Widespread communication solutions based on existing telecommunication infrastructures instead of using ad-hoc ones can be exploited for this purpose. In this paper, we recall the basic elements and the evolution of the SM network architecture focusing on how it could further improve in the near future. We report the main technologies and protocols which can be exploited for the data exchange throughout the infrastructure and the pros and cons of each solution. Finally, we propose an innovative solution as a possible evolution of the SM system. This solution is based on a set of Internet of Things (IoT) communication technologies called Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) which could be employed to improve the performance of the currently used technologies and provide additional functionalities. We also propose the employment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to periodically collect energy consumption data, with evident advantages especially if employed in rural and remote areas. We show some preliminary performance results which allow assessing the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are sensible targets. They could be physically damaged by natural or human actions, causing service disruptions, economic losses, and, in some extreme cases, harm to people. They, therefore, need a high level of protection against possible unintentional and intentional events. In this paper, we show a logical architecture that exploits information from both physical and cybersecurity systems to improve the overall security in a power plant scenario. We propose a Machine Learning (ML)-based anomaly detection approach to detect possible anomaly events by jointly correlating data related to both the physical and cyber domains. The performance evaluation showed encouraging results—obtained by different ML algorithms—which highlights how our proposed approach is able to detect possible abnormal situations that could not have been detected by using only information from either the physical or cyber domain.

Satellite constellations are envisioned as meaningful transport networks to forward data throughout the world, both as a solution for areas where there are no other telecommunication infrastructures or as a backup solution to support the terrestrial network. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are the most appealing for this purpose due to the achievable performance keeping low design and deployment costs. Mega-constellation made of thousands of small LEO satellites are planned to be employed to cover the entire Earth’s surface. However, smaller is the size and weight of satellites, higher are the technological challenges and stricter are the hardware constraints which affect the data forwarding process and have to be taken into account. Energy is one of them. Telecommunication hardware energy consumption is considerable, especially in case of high traffic volumes, while energy storage capacity and battery recharge rate are limited due to the small battery size and solar panel surface area, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-aware routing algorithm based on the Contact Graph Routing (CGR) called E-CGR. E-CGR exploits static and known a priori information about contacts to compute routing paths from sources to destinations which are then “validated” and “confirmed” from the energy viewpoint.