The growing number of mobile devices equipped with a wireless interface and the end-user trend to shift toward wireless technology is opening new possibilities for networking. In particular, opportunistic communication embodies a feasible solution for environments with scarce or costly infrastructurebased connectivity. In this context we provide a delay-tolerant solution that provides service opportunistic connectivity. Our approach follows the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) paradigm by implementing a store-carry-and-forward communication model among mobile users and buses, the latter embodying carrier entities. A user can delegate the carrier a request which involves Internet access. This request is then forwarded to the bus station's Internet Gateway (IG) in an opportunistic fashion, including both data muling and multi-hop transmission through other buses. Once the request is served at the bus station's IG, the result is opportunistically sent back toward the bus line where the user expects the result. In this paper we present our idea and discuss results obtained through simulations in a realistic urban scenario.

In today's technology-assisted society, social interactions may be expressed through a variety of techno-communication channels, including online social networks, email and mobile phones (calls, text messages). Consequently, a clear grasp of human behavior through the diverse communication media is considered a key factor in understanding the formation of the today's information society. So far, all previous research on user communication behavior has focused on a sole communication activity. In this paper we move forward another step on this research path by performing a multidimensional study of human sociality as an expression of the use of mobile phones. The paper focuses on user temporal communication behavior in the interplay between the two complementary communication media, text messages and phone calls, that represent the bi-dimensional scenario of analysis. Our study provides a theoretical framework for analyzing multidimensional bursts as the most general burst category, that includes one-dimensional bursts as the simplest case, and offers empirical evidence of their nature by following the combined phone call/text message communication patterns of approximately one million people over three-month period. This quantitative approach enables the design of a generative model rooted in the three most significant features of the multidimensional burst - the number of dimensions, prevalence and interleaving degree - able to reproduce the main media usage attitude. The other findings of the paper include a novel multidimensional burst detection algorithm and an insight analysis of the human media selection process.

The impact of the instances on the creation of links are weaker than those imposed by the nationality of the user, i.e. users are more bound by their geographical, cultural

Platooning of cars or trucks is one of the most relevant applications of autonomous driving, since it has the potential to greatly improve efficiency in road utilization and fuel consumption. Traditional proposals of vehicle platooning were based on distributed architectures with computation on board platoon vehicles and direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications (or Dedicated Short Range Communication -DSRC), possibly with the support of roadside units. However, with the introduction of the 5G technology and of computing elements at the edge of the network, according to the multi-access edge computing (MEC) paradigm, the possibility emerges of a centralized control of platoons through MEC, with several significant advantages with respect to the V2V approach. For this reason, in this paper we investigate the feasibility of vehicle platooning in a centralized scenario where the control of vehicle speed and acceleration is managed by the network through its MEC facilities, possibly with a platooning-as-a-service (PaaS) paradigm. Using a detailed simulator, we show that, with realistic values of latency and packet loss probability, large platoons can be effectively controlled by MEC hosts.

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