DISI - School of Engineering - Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna Mobile Systems M

CdS Laurea Magistrale (MSc) in Computer Engineering - academic year 2021-2022

Objectives and Technical Contents

General Info and Objectives

Necessary Previous Courses: NONE
but the technical contents of the “old” courses of computer networks (Reti di Calcolatori T and also, even if very partially, Computer Networks M), Sistemi Operativi T and Tecnologie Web T can be useful for sure.

Exam mode: LONG :-) oral interview
with the discussion of a small project activity – optional;
also opportunity of Project Activity - 4 ECTS

Course Goals (in extremely short):

in-depth competences on models and solutions for state-of-the-art mobile systems, for mobile services and applications provisioned on top of them, and for the support (middleware) needed for the development and runtime management of them.
Know-how about methodologies, models, and implementations to design, implement, deploy, and runtime evaluate mobile services

Output Skills and Abilities

• Supplements of wireless communications and systems
  • introductory elements of propagation and fading models
  • overview of primary characteristics of IEEE 802.11 (infrastrucured, ad hoc – WiFiDirect - and mesh-oriented)
  • overview of primary characteristics of cellular networking
  • overview of primary characteristics of IEEE 802.15
  • mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and main related routing protocols
  • mobility management, Mobile IP, iTCP, and positioning techniques
• The mobile middleware concept
  • platform examples, with in-depth technical presentation of Android features and programming model
  • principles and best practices of mobile app design
  • support technologies (SIP, edge cloud, 5G infrastructure, discovery in mobile environments, …)
  • advanced topics such as context awareness, service composition, and overlay networking
  • publish/subscribe
  • data synchronization
• Application areas and domain-specific deployments
  More «traditional» such as
  • location-aware and context-aware service
  • context management and smart spaces
    

  Or more «visionary» such as

  • vehicular and/or high-mobility networks, Delay Tolerant Networking, opportunistic networking
  • efficient integration mobile-to-cloud, cloudlet, fog computing, edge computing, virtualization and «containerization»
  • quality of information and sensed data in Internet-of-Things, Value of Information
  • edge/fog computing for Industry 4.0 manufacturing production lines
  • predictive/proactive maintenance, federated machine learning, ...
  • cooperative autonomus driving (fleet-oriented)
  • ...

In addition, the course will include:

• a few guided lab exercises about some topics and technologies described during lectures (horizontal and vertical handoff, Android, location-dependent services and positioning, Internet of Things management, cloudlets, …). These exercises will be solved autonomously by the students, with te support and supervision of the teacher; they will exploit advanced simulation environments (e.g., ns-2/ns-3, Qualnet, and SUMO) and Android/Raspberry PI devices
• discussion of real/realistic case studies, in particular in the application domains of location/context-aware services, efficient IoT-edge-cloud integration, and edge-enabled industrial IoT
• possible additional seminars to present significant company case studies

Requirements before attending this course

• Elements of computer networks, operating systems, and Web technologies
• Algorithms and programming skills
• Linux operating system
• Java programming language