Abstract
FLEXUS unmanned surface vehicle was designed in the context of the Internet of Moving Things. This small catamaran weights less than 15kg and is less than 1m long, making it a very convenient vehicle with reduced logistics needs for operations in real outdoor environments. The present paper describes the resulting system both in terms of design and performances. Based on the requirements for this project, the subsystems composing the vehicle are described. Results obtained from experiments conducted in outdoor conditions have successfully validated this design and are presented in this paper.

Abstract
The blue economy potential is envisioned to increase the activity at the ocean worldwide in the coming years. To support these activities and the convergence to the Internet of Moving Things, Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are considered viable platforms to enable a large number of missions, including border surveillance and environmental monitoring. Typically, USVs use Wi-Fi for communicating with shore. However, in the literature, there is a lack of studies characterizing the shore-to-USV Wi-Fi link. This paper studies the influence of distance and USV orientation on the shore-to-USV link quality at the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) bands. The study is supported by experimental results, collected during sea trials. For the 2.4 GHz band, we conclude that neither the Two-Ray propagation model nor the Friis propagation model allow a good fit to the experimental measurements. On the other hand, for the 5 GHz band, the Friis propagation model fits the obtained experimental results. © 2018 IEEE.

Abstract
The advent of small and low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is paving the way to use swarms of UAVs to perform missions such as aerial video monitoring and infrastructure inspection. Within a swarm, UAVs communicate by means of a Flying Multi-hop Network (FMN), which due to its dynamics induces frequent changes of network topology and quality of the links. Recently, UAVs have also been used to provide Internet access and enhance the capacity of existing networks in Temporary Events. This brings up additional routing challenges not yet addressed, in order to provide always-on and high capacity paths able to meet the Quality of Service expected by the users. This paper presents RedeFINE, a centralized routing solution for FMNs that selects high-capacity paths between UAVs and avoids communications disruptions, by defining in advance the forwarding tables and the instants they shall be updated in the UAVs; this represents a major step forward with respect to traditional routing protocols. The performance evaluation of RedeFINE shows promising results, especially regarding Throughput and Packet Delivery Ratio, when compared with state of the art routing solutions.

Abstract
The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has triggered the development of low-cost solutions characterised by low energy consumption and low complexity. To interconnect these devices, some wireless communications technologies including IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 have been used due to their deployment and management simplicity and high scalability. However, in scenarios where the devices are physically distant or there is a massive number of devices in a reduced area, cellular technologies such as 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) are seen as the solution. This paper proposes a network planning theoretical model for NB-IoT, named NB-IoT Deterministic Link Adaptation Model (NB-DLAM), which can be used to estimate Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), transmission time, and throughput. NB-DLAM estimations were compared with simulation results, which show the accuracy of the proposed model.

Abstract
The growing demand for broadband communications anytime, anywhere has paved the way to the usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for providing Internet access in areas without network infrastructure and enhancing the performance of existing networks. However, the usage of Flying Multi-hop Networks (FMNs) in such scenarios brings up significant challenges concerning network routing, in order to permanently provide the Quality of Service expected by the users. The problem is exacerbated in crowded events, where the FMN may be formed by many UAVs to address the traffic demand, causing interflow interference within the FMN. Typically, estimating inter-flow interference is not straightforward and requires the exchange of probe packets, thus increasing network overhead. The main contribution of this paper is an inter-flow interference-aware routing metric, named I2R, designed for centralized routing in FMNs with controllable topology. I2R does not require any control packets and enables the configuration of paths with minimal Euclidean distance formed by UAVs with the lowest number of neighbors in carrier-sense range, thus minimizing inter-flow interference in the FMN. Simulation results show the I2R superior performance, with significant gains in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay, when compared with state of the art routing metrics.

Abstract
Besides the large amount of traffic that radio access and backhaul networks need to accommodate, the interest in low-latency communications is emerging. The goal is to reliably transmit high bitrates through the network under controlled delays, thus enabling human and machine-oriented communications. A critical aspect that must be addressed is the latency introduced by network queues. The literature has been focused on studying the queue size in wired networks, but wireless networks bring up additional challenges due to their dynamic characteristics. The problem is exacerbated in high dynamic networks, such as Flying Networks (FNs) composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which have emerged to provide communications anywhere, anytime. The main contribution of this paper is a Proactive Queue Management (PQM) solution for FNs with controlled topology. PQM takes advantage of the knowledge of the future FN topologies and the offered traffic to define in advance the queue size of the communications nodes over time, in order to maximize the throughput with stochastic delay guarantees. The FN performance achieved using PQM is evaluated by means of ns-3 simulations, showing gains regarding aggregate throughput and average delay.