SCAVENGE NEWSLETTER NO. 3

H2020 SCAVENGE (http://www.scavenge.eu/)

Funded by the EU in the framework of the H2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Action - Innovative Training Networks.

1. Call: H2020-MSCA-ITN-20152. Acronym: SCAVENGE (project No. 675891)3. Duration: 48 months4. Start date: 2016-02-015. Project Coordinator: Paolo Dini - CTTC6. Project Officer: Nina Poumpalova - REA

scavengesustainable cellular networks harvesting ambient energy

SCAVENGENewsletter No. 3

In This Issue• At the peak of our research• Training goes on ...• Stay in touch with us• News from the ESRs

Our partners

SCAVENGE newsletter no. 3

At the peak of our research activity

Once training is concluded, with 2018, our ESRs have been fully and produc-tively committed to their research. Most of them have presented their workat top-tier international conferences and workshops, such as IEEE PIMRC2018 (Bologna, Italy, September 2018), IEEE ICC 2018 (Kansas City, USA,May 2018) and IEEE GLOBECOM 2018 (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates,November 2018). To date, within the SCAVENGE network 8 journal papershave been published, some in excellent venues such as IEEE Access and IEEETransactions on Green Communications and Networking. Moreover, 31 addi-tional papers were published at workshops and conferences. For details aboutour publications, see the SCAVENGE publications page. Most secondmentsended in 2018, and the ESRs are now back to their home institutions. Afew secondments are still ongoing, e.g., F. Conceição (ESR02), D. Temesgene(ESR04), N. Piovesan (ESR05). In general, in 2018 the ESRs have been work-ing towards publishing their latest results in prestigious journal papers, andanother round of submissions should occur before summer 2019. In 2018,two ESRs have received a Best Paper Award for outstanding contributions,at IEEE GLOBECOM 2017 (ESR06, best paper in the Green CommunicationsSystems and Networks Symposium) and IEEE WCNC 2018 (ESR09, Best Stu-dent Paper across all papers in the conference). Finally, as part of SCAVENGE,special sessions were organized at IEEE WCNC 2018 and IEEE PIMRC 2018.

Training goes on ...

Although SCAVENGE training schools all successfully took place in 2016-2017,a vivid training activity has been continued in 2018 with the co-organizationof the Summer School of Information Engineering in Brixen. This schoolhas been co-organized by the Department of Engineering at the Universityof Padova and SCAVENGE senior researchers, addressing selected topics onsensors, signal processing, deep learning and applications.

A group picture from the Brixen school follows :-)

Stay in touch with us

The perhaps easiest and most enter-taining way to see what’s going on isthrough our You Tube channel.

There, you can find the lessons fromour first three schools and much more,including: video lessons & tutorials,news from the students, technical

achievements, talks to public events,etc.

Back to Contents

Contact Information:http://www.scavenge.euEmail: paolo.dini@cttc.es

News from the ESRs

Ibrahim Fawaz (ESR01)

The explosive growth of mo-bile communications and Inter-net of Things (IoT) driven by thehuge number of connected de-vices and resource-hungry mobileapplications is increasing signifi-cantly the demands for high-volumedelay-sensitive data traffic, requir-ing thus intensive computation andleading to high energy consumption.However, this expansion of wirelessservices is still restrained by mobileterminals limitations in terms of pro-cessing capacity, storage and energy.My thesis aims at studying optimaldata transmission policies with of-floading functionalities by leveragingon devices? energy harvesting ca-pabilities in order to guarantee bet-ter performance in terms of energyconsumption, packet error rate, la-tency, etc. During the first period ofthe thesis, we have addressed thisnetwork optimization problem. Inparticular, we have investigated thejoint optimization of resource schedul-ing and computation offloading formobile networks, where EH-enableddevices are wirelessly connected tonearby BSs, which can be endowedwith some computational capabili-ties. The main contribution of thiswork is the introduction of a strictdelay constraint instead of the av-erage delay constraint used in priorwork. This activity has resulted inthree accepted papers at IEEE GLOB-ALSIP 2017, IEEE ICC 2018 and IEEEICT 2018. As all the previous workconsiders a perfect Channel StateInformation (CSI) at the mobile termi-nal, an extension that we are studyingis to check the robustness of our pol-icy based on an estimated value ofthe channel, and then to adapt ourtransmission policy to the case of anunknown channel by the terminal. On

the other hand, I spent the last fivemonths at Imperial College, London,to study deep learning techniques andapply them in my work. This second-ment gave me the chance to growtechnically and to collaborate withother important institutions.

Overall, working within the SCAVENGEproject provided me with a unique op-portunity to gain professional researchexperience and strong analytical andsynthesis skills, provided me with agood set of technical and non-technicalskills and prepared me with the nec-essary expertise to dive into both theindustrial and academic fields at theend of my thesis.

Filipe Conceição (ESR02)

Year 2018 was very very intense! Itwas a year to finalize ongoing re-search, start a new research topic, en-ter the world of machine learning andstart a secondment period. All of thatwith a Scavenge Project school and aposter workshop in the middle. Tech-nically, an energy model for IoT de-vices has been developed taking intoaccount both networking and securitytasks. Conclusions were drawn in re-gards to security aspects of network-ing. This resulted in a publicationat IEEE PIMRC 2018, which was pre-sented in the beautiful city of Bologna.Then, I started working on the appli-cation of machine learning techniquesto security in device-to-device (D2D)communications under the guidanceof Prof. Michele Rossi from Padua Uni-versity. The goal is to save energyby applying security features dynam-ically, when they are required. Ini-tial ideas were discussed during theScavenge meeting in Barcelona (Sept.2018), during the poster session andwork is currently under full develop-ment.... (continues on next page)

Back to Contents

OutlineOur vision

• Energy sustainability is keyto future mobile networksdue to their foreseen capac-ity upsurge.

• SCAVENGE introduces theconcept of Sustainable 5GMobile Network.

• Environmental energy canbe used to power the mo-bile system elements likebase stations, mobile termi-nals, sensors and machines.

Our mission

• SCAVENGE’s objective isto create a training net-work for early-stage re-searchers (ESRs) who willcontribute to the designand implementation of eco-friendly and sustainablenext-generation 5G nets.

• SCAVENGE encompassestheory along with the op-timisation and proof-of-concept implementation ofbase stations and mobile el-ements as well as their inte-gration with the smart elec-trical grid.

Our team

• The attitude of SCAV-ENGE’s industrial partnerstowards the strong invest-ment in R&D and theirstrategic vision are fullyaligned with the mission ofthis project.

• The ESRs will have aunique opportunity to-wards professional growthin light of dedicatedcross-partner trainingactivities and throughthe interaction with theinternational PartnerOrganisations, which alsoinclude relevant stake-holders in the envisionedmarket.

Back to Contents

(from previous page) ...Finally, towardsthe end of the year, a secondment pe-riod started at Toshiba Research Labsin Bristol, UK. The goal is to gatherknowledge based on their expertise inindustrial research, use their testbedand simulator knowledge and expe-rience and apply those skills to pro-totype IoT devices running the ideasthat have been developed.

Scavenge has proven to be a networkof people with great knowledge, pro-fessional and kind, wanting to cooper-ate and doing everything to make theproject a major research success. Work-ing alongside them made me grow im-mensely in all aspects required to pro-duce good research. I am happy to bepart of this team, and 2019 will be aneven more intense year and I am surethat will mean growing even more.

Hoang Duy Trinh (ESR03)

2018 has been a great year for my pro-fessional growth: I have been hostedto University of Maryland from Octo-ber 2017 to February to work withDr. Ulukus, and his research group onenergy harvesting models for commu-nications systems. It has been a greatopportunity to work alongside suchexpert people on this topic, and more-over, it gave me the chance to fully ap-preciate the American academic envi-ronment. At the moment, my researchtopic is focused on analyzing the mo-bile traffic that comes from real sce-narios. We have developed a method-ology to gather network and trafficinformation from different base sta-tions, without harming the user pri-vacy and security. The collection of alarge dataset was the first step to cre-ate a mobile traffic model: to this end,we are studying the potential of recur-rent neural networks, a novel machinelearning technique that shows out-standing performance for traffic pre-diction. Preliminary results were pub-lished and presented at IEEE PIMRC2018 in Bologna, Italy, in September2018. The next steps are to deepen

the traffic analysis to an app-basedlevel: the goal here is to try to under-stand and predict which apps is cur-rently running on the user’s devices,without breaking any encrypted chan-nel.

The SCAVENGE training network facil-itates the connection between the re-searchers involved: part of the datasetcollection has been accomplished work-ing with ESR 06. We expect to submit ajournal paper at the beginning of 2019.Moreover, with ESR 14, we are initi-ating a couple of works on the topic ofdiscontinuous receiving (DRX), which isan important feature for energy savingin next generation networks.

Dagnachew Temesgene (ESR04)

In year 2018, a study of optimalplacement of functional split optionsfor the scenario of energy harvest-ing virtual small cells has been car-ried out. Formulation of the opti-mization problem and its solutionby applying dynamic programming,shortest path search in particular, wasachieved. A paper with the descrip-tion of the approach and simulationresults was presented at the IEEE VTC-Fall 2018 conference held in Chicago,USA. Moreover, an extension of thestudy that focuses on the applicationof reinforcement learning on func-tional split placement was completed,and the results were presented at theIEEE PIMRC 2018 conference heldin Bologna, Italy. These conferenceswere useful not only to get importantfeedback on future work, but also toimprove my presentation and commu-nication skills. In addition to theseconferences, a joint journal paper, to-gether with ESR 05, has been submit-ted to IEEE Access on the methodsof ensuring energy sustainability inHetNet and MEC enabled mobile net-works. Currently, a study on the appli-cation of fuzzy Q-learning and deepreinforcement learning is underway,targeting journal and conference pub-lications. Moreover, a secondment at

Imperial College London is plannedfrom March, 2019 to September 2019.

Nicola Piovesan (ESR05)

In the last year, I continued investi-gating the problem of the increasedpower consumption due to the aug-mented system capacity required by5G networks. This requirement willbe met by deploying more network el-ements, in particular small cells, in ascenario that is usually referred to as“ultra-dense”. Specifically, I focusedmy research on the management ofself-sustainable small cells poweredby renewable energy. The problemof minimizing the grid energy con-sumption and maximizing the systemperformance can be solved by opti-mally switching ON/OFF the smallcells. Furthermore, additional savingscan be achieved by computational of-floading some of the network func-tions. To this purpose, I collaboratedwith Dagnachew (ESR-04) to comeup with a first analysis of the opti-mal load control of small cells in thisscenario, and the results have beenpresented to the IEEE VTC confer-ence in Chicago (USA). We also ex-plored the possibility by the small cellsto share their exceeding energy withother network elements. We analyzedthe optimal dimensions of the har-vesting/storage devices, the boundson the grid energy consumption andthe economic costs. A journal pa-per has been recently submitted. Inthe last year, I also worked on theclassification of cities based on theirenergy harvesting characteristics. Iproposed an unsupervised method tolearn hidden features of the solar en-ergy generation from a photovoltaicsystem that may give a more accuratecharacterization of the process. Thiswork has been presented to the IEEEPIMRC conference in Bologna (Italy).In February 2019, I started my second-ment at Nokia Bell Labs in Dublin (Ire-land). During the secondent, I planto extend my analysis by considering

more realistic constraints in the sce-nario I am studying and exploit ma-chine learning techniques to designonline algorithms for the load controlof small cells.

As a final remark, the interactions withother ESRs and the joint works withthem (i.e., deliverables and papers)have been a great opportunity to im-prove my team working skills.

Angel Fernandez Gambin (ESR06)

I started 2018 moving to CTTC as mysecondment period. There, I havebeen working in collaboration withESR03 in the design of data ana-lytic techniques for 5G mobile traf-fic. Specifically, a journal paper onmobile traffic classification towardsLTE physical channel fingerprintinghas been done as a major outcome.Meanwhile, I was invited to attend theIEEE ICC 2018 conference to receivethe best paper award in Green Com-munications Systems and NetworksSymposium for my contribution inIEEE GLOBECOM 2017. A major jour-nal extending this contribution hasbeen published, where pattern recog-nition and foresighted optimizationare put together to intelligently allo-cate and route energy across a sus-tainable mobile network powered bysolar energy. Moreover, within thistopic, I presented a joint work withESR07 at IEEE WCNC 2017, about en-ergy cooperation for sustainable IoTservices within smart cities. Then, Ifocused together with ESR11 on theintegration of energy harvesting mo-bile networks within a Mobile EdgeComputing (MEC) paradigm. With it,computing and communications areperformed at the network edge, i.e.,at the base station site, where com-putation resources are in the form ofvirtual machines co-located in a localMEC server. Algorithms and strategiesto jointly manage energy and compu-tation resources, decreasing the en-ergy consumption while guarantee-ing the Quality of Service in the net-

work have been addressed. Contribu-tions at the IEEE PIMRC 2018 confer-ence and Wireless Communicationsand Mobile Computing journal arethe main outcomes. Currently, smartenergy management strategies withthe goal of diminishing the cost in-curred in the energy purchases fromthe power grid are under investiga-tion. This is achieved by intelligentlycontrolling the amount of energy thatbase stations buy from the electricalgrid over time, by accounting for theharvested energy, the traffic load, andhourly energy prices. Pattern fore-casting and adaptive control are com-bined to this end. A first contributionhas been presented at IEEE GLOBE-COM 2018, and a journal extension ofthis work is ongoing.

In short, it has been a fruitful year, fullof work and new experiences, whichhave allowed me to grow professionallyand to better understand the researchsector.

Elvina Gindullina (ESR07)

From January to August 2018, I wasa part of Worldsensing’s innovationteam. Worldsensing is a globally ac-tive IoT company located in Barcelona(Spain), that provides IoT-solutionsfor traditional industries and cities,and operates over 50 countries. To-gether with Worldsensing we stud-ied and tested energy alternativesavailable for residential or industrialbuildings. Worldsensing developedan IoT monitoring device powered bysolar energy deployed on a buildingclose to Barcelona. The technologyis supported by Worldsensing?s wire-less monitoring system for remote as-sets and infrastructures, Loadsensing.I provided the theoretical analysis ofthe Loadsensing operation (state ofcharge), powered by a solar panel,taking into account its energy con-sumption, battery characteristics, sam-pling rates, location and characteris-tics of the solar panel. Based on it,together with Prof. Xavier Vilajosana

(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), westudied different sampling strategiesfor an energy harvesting data-loggerpowered by a rechargeable battery,where we derived the most effectivesensing/transmitting strategy in termsof data accuracy and energy consump-tion, taking into account samplingrate limitations. In other respects, atWorldsensing I was a part of a pro-fessional and innovative team, whereI gained the research experience inthe industrial environment. I learnedhow to manage/plan my work withinan agile system, do estimations of therequired efforts, and understand realindustrial requirements. During 2018,I presented two papers at IEEE WCNC2018 held in Barcelona, Spain: “AnOptimization Framework for EnergyTopologies in Smart Cities”, where wepropose to represent a Smart City asa common distribution space of infor-mation and energy, that can be consid-ered as a system-of-system topology;and “Energy Cooperation for Sustain-able IoT Services within Smart Cities”,where we study energy cooperation inan Internet of Things (IoT) scenario.The latter was written in cooperationwith ESR06.

Mehmet Emre Ozfatura (ESR08)

In 2018, as a part of the SCAVENGEproject, I have worked at the Univer-sity of Maryland under supervision ofthe Prof. Sennur Ulukus. This sec-ondment was a great opportunity forme and has provided valuable expe-riences. During the secondment, wehave focused on distributed computa-tion architectures and our aim was toutilize different coding strategies toachieve communication efficient andstraggler tolerant distributed compu-tation frameworks. We have submit-ted our results to ISIT 2019, DSW2019, ICASSP 2019 (accepted) confer-ences. In 2019, our plan is to extendour research to edge learning frame-work in wireless networks and to alsostudy energy harvesting edge comput-

ing nodes.

The SCAVENGE project provides col-laboration opportunities with otherresearchers working in similar areas,hence we are also seeking collaborationwith other researchers to work togetheron designing edge learning frameworksfor energy harvesting networks.

Nitish Mital (ESR09)

In the year 2018, I presented a paperat IEEE WCNC, which won the beststudent paper award. The paperwas titled “coded caching in a multi-server system with random topology”.I had my secondment from June toSeptember in New York Universitywith Prof. Elza Erkip. The experiencewas exciting. There was a lot of indus-try collaboration within the NYU wire-less group, and there was the fourthworkshop of NSF mmWave RCN heldin NYU during my time there. Besidesthe academic advantages of collabo-rating with Prof. Erkip in the highlydynamic NYU wireless, living in NewYork for 3 months and indulging my-self in the New York lifestyle, and alsovisiting MIT campus in Boston, mademy stay exciting. I presented a paperat IEEE ITW held in China. The pa-per was titled ?Storage-Repair Band-width Tradeoff for Wireless Cachingwith Partial Failure and Broadcast Re-pair?. That workshop had many newinteresting results in active areas ofresearch, and introduced me to a cou-ple of ideas which came in handy formy next paper submitted to IEEE ISIT,titled ?Practical Functional Regener-ating Codes for Broadcast Repair ofMultiple Nodes?.

Being in the Scavenge Network and Im-perial College has provided me withthe financial resources to be able toattend conferences and secondmentswhich helped me to grow profession-ally, and the necessary training schoolsneeded for a good research output.

Vianney Anis (ESR10)

The main focus of my research for thepast year has been on the implemen-tation of multi-carrier systems on soft-ware defined radio (SDR) platforms.Moving toward this goal, I joined theTelecommunications Research Labora-tory of Toshiba in Bristol (UK) for anine months secondment from April2018. During this secondment, I wasable to benefit from the experiencein SDR implementation of researchersfrom Toshiba, while sharing my ownknowledge on implementation of sig-nal processing algorithms on varioustypes of platforms. My time in Toshibahas allowed me to develop an ex-perimentation process that will al-low me in a near future to comparethe power consumption of variousmulti-carrier designs implemented onan FPGA-based SDR platform, bothin simulations and on a real device.In April 2018, I presented my workon equalisers implementation in rela-tion to power consumption for over-sampled FFT-modulated filter-bankmulti-carrier systems at IEEE WCNC.Throughout the year, I carried on withmy work on wavelet-based filter bankas well as heterogeneous network op-timisation with results to be publishedsoon.

Thembelihle Dlamini (ESR11)

I am Dlamini Thembelihle (Lihle), amember of the SCAVENGE researchgroup as ESR11 and my research fo-cuses on the application of machinelearning and control techniques toedge computing systems with theaim of minimizing energy consump-tion using energy management pro-cedures, and then enabling energy

self-sustainability in mobile networkswith the use of energy harvestingsystems and energy storage devices.During year 2018, I was on second-ment at the University of Padova, De-partment of Information Engineering,Italy. The outcome of my researchwork was a conference paper titled“Online Resource Management in En-ergy Harvesting BS Sites through Pre-diction and Soft-Scaling of Comput-ing Resources” published at the In-ternational Symposium on Personal,Indoor and Mobile Radio Communica-tions (PIMRC 2018) which was heldin Bologna, Italy. This was followedby a Journal, which is an extensionof the conference paper, and it waspublished to the Wireless Communica-tions and Mobile Computing (WCMC)journal.

During my secondment, I have im-proved my mathematical modeling andscientific paper writing skills.

Pavlos Triantaris (ESR12)

Owing to my late entry into the SCAV-ENGE programme, my secondmentat Imperial College London has nottaken place yet. However, I am verysatisfied with the time that I havehad the privilege of spending underToshiba Research Europe Ltd. TheBristol Laboratory team has undeni-ably provided my research endeav-ours with high-quality equipment andattentive supervision. My first re-search paper under SCAVENGE, ti-tled “Automatic Modulation Classifi-cation in the Presence of Interfer-ence”, was drafted and submitted forreview to EUCNC 2019, which shalltake place in Barcelona. Until thatpoint, presentation of my research

took place mainly in presentations forSCAVENGE and ICL. Given that PhDstudy path is a highly demanding task,I hold that it shall be proven crucialfor my professional development asan engineer.

Of course, being part of the SCAVENGEproject has provided a valuable oppor-tunity to familiarise myself with an aca-demic and an industrial environment,as well as continuous inspiration andsupport.

Ioana Suciu (ESR13)

In June 2018, I joined the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, for 4months, as part of the Scavenge sec-ondment, where I had the opportu-nity to work with very talented peo-ple in an exceptional research environ-ment. Under the direct supervision ofProf. Kristofer Pister, my work focused

on exploring and developing synchro-nization algorithms for a new genera-tion of chips for IoT. During 2018, ourresearch was presented at three con-ferences: the IEEE Wireless Commu-nications and Networking Conference(Barcelona, Spain), the InternationalConference on Ad Hoc Networks andWireless (St. Malo, France) and theIEEE International Symposium on Per-sonal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Com-munications (Bologna, Italy).

All the events organized within Scav-enge, including training, secondmentsand the collaboration opportunities itcreates, make it an amazing projectthat continuously contributes to theprofessional growth of its students.

Soheil Rostami (ESR14)

Year 2018 was very fruitful for me, Ihad an amazing opportunity to do mysecondment at CTTC, where I havebeen conducting research under su-pervision of Dr. Paolo Dini and Dr.Sandra Lagen. The experience is veryinteresting, because I learn on a dailybasis, a lot about optimization, ma-chine learning, and general problemsolving techniques. As a result of mycollaboration with CTTC, we achievedsome amazing results regarding a newwake-up scheme for next generationmobile systems, answering challeng-ing questions such as how to config-ure the wake-up scheme’s parameters,and in which scenarios the scheme iseffective. Furthermore, we presentedour work in top-tier conferences suchas PIMRC and GLOBECOM. With thehelp of my friends in Scavenge, I amworking on deep learning methods fortraffic prediction with application towake-up scheme design.

By the end of project, I will try tolearn some implementation tools formachine learning techniques such asKeras and tensorflow, and hopefullystart applying for jobs in both indus-try and academia. Last but not least,I am learning how to write researchproposals at CTTC, fur future researchgrant applications.

Back to Contents