Comunicazioni Radio e Monitoraggio - Opportunità e Sfide in Reti Consapevoli del Contesto

The widespread deployment of wireless communication networks in both indoor and outdoor spaces opens the door to a variety of new opportunities and, at the same time, poses several technical challenges. In this scenario, environment awareness represents both a new appealing side functionality offered by wireless systems, and a promising way to increase the quality of the services provided to the users. As for the former, wireless devices are intrinsically capable of sensing the propagation environment. The estimation of the wireless channel parameters is continuously performed at the receiver end of the communication link to properly decode the radio signals collected by the antennas. This feature can be exploited to gain knowledge of the surrounding space by detecting the presence of obstacles through the analysis of the multi-path propagation effect. The potential of this application resides in the possibility to realize indoor monitoring systems leveraging already deployed devices – such as Wi-Fi access points. The scientific community is extensively studying this opportunity, developing algorithms that target different sensing applications such as human-presence detection and activity recognition. The envisioned applications attracted the interest of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) that established a task force to develop a new version of the Wi-Fi standard, named IEEE 802.11bf. By 2024, the standard will enable the joint provisioning of the communication and the sensing services to the users. Moving to the second aspect, information about the context where the wireless devices are operating enables reasoned management of the available network resources, guaranteeing an adequate quality of experience to the connected users. This is especially appealing when considering the emerging fifth generation – and beyond – systems, where the network will provide both connectivity and computation support for static and moving terminals, e.g., connected vehicles. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standardization body is actively working on this paradigm change – named multi-access edge computing (MEC) – through the standardization of new interoperable architectures. In this context, the network entities need to properly handle the handover of the computation service provisioning to avoid critical discontinuity issues. The exploitation of environmental information in such network management processes provides a clear benefit from both a network and a user perspective, allowing the operators to optimize the energy consumption while assuring a timely fulfillment of the customers' requests. This thesis makes substantial contributions to the development of new-generation wireless networks, since in the future environmental awareness will be one of the key enablers. The interplay between wireless communications and sensing is discussed by detailing the design and the implementation – together with the assessment of the performance – of brand-new algorithms for environment aware networks. In-depth theoretical analysis is combined with advanced practical implementations and simulative evaluations. The strength of the detailed approaches is the combination of machine and deep learning processing techniques with mathematical models that provide solid foundations for the integration of the two services. Both communication-assisted sensing and sensing-assisted communication applications are presented through practical uses cases. Next-generation Wi-Fi and cellular networks are considered as examples of respectively the former and the latter case, showing the potential of the environment aware paradigm in both indoor and outdoor scenarios.