Curriculum
Leonardo Badia was born in Ferrara, Italy, in 1977. His address is: via XX Settembre 131, 44100 Ferrara.
He received the Laurea degree (with honors) in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. in Information Engineering (with highest mark) from the University of Ferrara, Italy, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. During 2002 and 2003 he was on leave at the Radio System Technology Labs (now Wireless@KTH), Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, Sweden. After having been with the Engineering Department of the University of Ferrara, Italy, he joined in 2006 the ``Institutions, Markets, Technologies'' (IMT) Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, in Lucca, Italy, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. He also collaborates with the Universities of Padova and Pisa (Italy) and Aalborg (Denmark).
Study activity
Leonardo Badia took his MS degree with a thesis entitled “Efficienza energetica dei protocolli di comunicazione per reti radiomobili,” (Energy efficiency of communication protocols for wireless networks), with Prof. Michele Zorzi as advisor. In 2001, he entered the PhD program in Information Engineering (XVI cycle) of the University of Ferrara. From 2001 to 2003 he attended the PhD courses in Ferrara. Between 2002 and 2003 he was on leave at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, as visiting researcher. During this period, he also participated to several international Summer Schools for PhD students.
In 2004, he took his PhD degree with a thesis entitled “Efficient management techniques for the Radio Resource Allocation in Wireless Interference-Limited Communication Systems,” with Prof. Michele Zorzi as advisor. Until 2006 he did research activity at the University of Ferrara, first as a PhD student, then as a post-doctoral fellow. In May 2006 he moved to the newly founded IOS (Special Order Institute) IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, in Lucca, Italy, where he is currently a research assistant.
Scientific activity
Leonardo Badia authored 70 scientific papers, plus 4 books or book chapters. All the scientific papers were published on peer reviewed international journal or conferences. In particular, he authored 20 journal papers, for an overall IF >20, and is indexed by scholar.google with more than 250 citations. Papers authored by Dr. Badia received the Best Paper Award at the following conferences:
• IEEE MobiWac 2005
• IEEE CAMAD 2006
• IEEE Globecom 2007,Wireless Networks Symposium
Overall, Leonardo Badia co-authored papers with more than 50 researchers and worked with an even larger number of scientists and researchers.
Professional activity
Leonardo Badia is an IEEE member, a Communication Society member, an ACM member and a CNIT member. He actively participates to the editorial processes of scientific conferences and journals. In particular, he is very active as TPC member or organizing committee members for a dozen of IEEE conferences (including IEEE Globecom and IEEE ICC) and served as reviewer for several major journals and conferences (among which we cite many IEEE Transactions, IEEE Infocom and ACM Mobicom).
Finally, Dr. Badia has participated to more than 30 scientific conferences and has presented more than 50 scientific papers to a conference or a seminar.
Work activity
Leonardo Badia participated to the following research projects.
- From 2001 to 2005, he was a contact person for the University of Ferrara in a Frame Agreement with Ericsson, Sweden. The role of Leonardo Badia was to define, implement and evaluate several algorithms for the Radio Resource Management, and especially Call Admission Control, in Wideband CDMA syatems. Within this collaboration activity, Leonardo Badia interacted with several Ericsson researchers and visited several times the Ericsson offices in Kista.
- From 2004 to 2006, he was involved in the activities of the University of Ferrara within the EU project “Ambient Networks.” He was responsible for optimization of radio resource management and related economic issue. He also investigated with other researchers efficient techniques for device clustering, exploiting physical proximity of terminals in a cooperative manner.
- From 2004 to 2006 he worked within the EU Network of Excellence NEWCOM. In particular, he studied QoS provisioning over heterogeneous networks and the relationship of this challenge with economic issues.
- From 2007 to 2008 he is participating to the NADIR project, a National Project managed by the University of Pisa. He is mainly involved in research about Wireless Mesh Networks and related scientific and technological solutions.
Teaching activity
Leonardo Badia taught several courses as Lecturer or Assistant lecturer at the University of Ferrara. In particular, he taught the full course “Digital Signal Processing” at the University of Ferrara from 2004 to 2006. This course was given in Italian. Additionally, he has also been Lecturer for various short courses of Mathematical Analysis (applications to signal processing) at the same university from 2003 to 2008. During 2008, he has also taught “Fundamentals of Internet, Wireless Networks and Computer Engineering,” a PhD course for first year PhD students, at IMT Lucca, Italy, entirely given in English, and the distinguished lectures series “Game Theory and its application to Computer Engineering” for MS and PhD students at the University of Pisa, Italy. Finally, he also provided several seminars and lectures to other courses, including, but not limited to, Telecommunication Systems, Wireless Systems, Multimedia Communication. Overall, Dr. Badia has given lectures for more than 500 hours. He judged more than 100 students, both in the Digital Signal Processing course or other related courses.
Research activity
The research topics explored by Leonardo Badia include, but are not limited to, the following: multi-hop networks, and their economic and energetic efficiency; Micro-economic and Game-theoretic tools for Radio Resource Management; Modeling of retransmission-based error-correcting protocols; Impact of mobility on Radio Resource Management issues; Terminal cooperative aggregation to improve resource usage in heterogeneous networks.
- Multi-hop networks. Many wireless network paradigms, including, but not limited to, Ad Hoc Networks, Sensor Networks and Wireless Mesh Networks, involve multi-hop transmission between source and destination [12]. On the one hand, a wireless networks can work even without cable deployment and with a very limited infrastructure. On the other hand, the uncertainties of the wireless medium make it challenging to transmit in a capacity- and energy-efficient manner. For this reason, several techniques were proposed and analyzed. Interestingly, it is also possible combine this research point with the next one (Micro-economic models of allocation efficiency), yet at the same time also optimization techniques come into play. Finally, a very interesting branch of this research involves underwater networks [10], which can still be studied with similar algorithms, but one must take into account their longer delay (compared to radio networks, since they use acoustic signaling instead) and very low data rate.
- Micro-economic and Game-theoretic tools for the Radio Resource Management. To frame the resource allocation in a proper economic context [2], one can take a micro-economic approach and define utility functions which map the resource allocation into perceived QoS [5]. Utility functions can thus be regarded as mathematical instrument which allows characterizing users’ preferences in a precise and clear manner. This can be further used in a game-theoretic context in order to determine how users interact with each other. Especially, it has been proven that if selfish decisions are taken, the resulting allocation point is often an inefficient Nash equilibrium. Thus, specific algorithms should be designed to deal with this problem and encourage users, acting in an uncoordinated distributed manner, to cooperate.
- Modeling of retransmission-based error-correcting protocols. Retransmission-based techniques, such as Automatic Repeat request (ARQ), or Hybrid ARQ, are a widely employed technique to correct channel impairments and guarantee data reliability. The research carried out in this sense has focused at first with original analytical models of these techniques, making use of Markov analysis through proper finite-state chains [7]. Several cases have been analyzed and the confirmed by means of simulation. Hence, a new direction has been also identified, namely the derivation of a proper Markov chains in the cases where HARQ is used, where an additional requirement arise, i.e., to integrate code and channel effects to determine data reliability [14].
- Impact of mobility on Radio Resource Management issues. In general, the investigations about wireless networks do not adequately explore mobility issues, as it is assumed to be negligible. Actually, mobility has a strong impact on network performance. The investigations performed in this sense have been twofold. On the one hand, the connectivity performance of a multi-hop network has been studied under strong mobility of the users. In this case, in order to have realistic mobility patterns, we proposed to employ multi-player games [1] which proved to be quite an improvement with respect to existing unrealistic models which are generally based on random walk. On the other hand, we also studied how to take mobility into account in analytical model and we found at the same time that admission control performance is impacted by the user’s velocity. For this reason, it is important to evaluate, together with other existing metrics, the fairness with respect to the mobility class of the device [8].
· Bio-inspired techniques for networking – Another main research activity involved the definition of several schemes for wireless networks based on bio-inspired instruments, in particular concerning the use of Genetic Algorithms to perform cross-layer optimization of wireless networks. Genetic Algorithms are a technique which mimics the evolution process taking place in the nature, along with its natural selection, reproduction, and mutation processes [3]. Their aim is to find an efficient solution with low complexity but simply copying what happens in the nature. In this way, novel techniques have been proposed for resource allocation and cross-layer scheduling and routing in multi-hop networks [13].
- Terminal cooperative aggregation to improve resource usage in heterogeneous networks. Clustering techniques have been widely applied to static data sets, or to introduce a hierarchy on networks generally assumed as static. However, in view of the considerations made in the previous point, real world wireless networks are on the move, and thus there is need for dynamic clustering of the mobile devices [9]. Moreover, another dimension is added by considering that current wireless devices have strongly different capabilities and are not always able to interact due to different access techniques. For these reasons, the first contribution introduced in this field was the definition of dynamic aggregation strategies where, through the exchange of beacon messages, nodes can learn environment information about surrounding cooperative devices and create local networks on the spot. Moreover, it was shown through both analysis and simulative approaches that this dynamic clustering is also able to improve the network connectivity enabling to overcome incompatibilities due to different access technology.
This last research topic, which has produced several papers, three of which were prized with the Best Paper Award at IEEE international conferences [4][6][11], is very promising. Actually, it is possible to think of extending its scope and integrating it with game-theoretic and cognitive network aspects. In particular, a very promising research topic for the future seems that of investigating how cooperative groups of mobile devices created on the spot can exchange data in a distributed manner. In such a scenario, physical mobility introduces the further challenge that most of the connections are dynamic. Thus, data should be exchanged in a proactive and opportunistic manner. On the other hand, devices’ mobility can even be turned into an advantage, as it improves the data diversity and increase the epidemic spreading of information. Moreover, as discussed from the game-theoretic point of view, collaboration is not granted. Instead, it should be encouraged through proper techniques, so as to promote efficient channel access. In this manner it would be possible to change the network view from the perspective of a single atomic terminal to the one of a team of co-working devices, which does not necessarily need to be extremely powerful since they can share capabilities. Finally, it is also necessary to avoid unnecessary or even malicious data to be acquired. Thus, efficient social rules are needed, e.g., to recognize trusted senders or avoid network flooding. All these issues open new promising directions, which will be the next goal for future research in wireless networks.
Selected references
[1] F. Fitzek, L. Badia, M. Zorzi, G. Schulte, P. Seeling, T. Henderson, “Mobility and stability evaluation in wireless multi-hop networks using multiplayer games,” Proceedings ACM NetGames 2003, San Francisco (CA), USA, May 2003.
[2] L. Badia, M. Lindström, J. Zander, M. Zorzi, “An economic model for the radio resource management in multimedia wireless systems,” Elsevier’s Computer Communications, April 2004.
[3] L. Badia, C. Saturni, L. Brunetta, M. Zorzi, “An optimization framework for radio resource management based on utility vs. price tradeoff in WCDMA systems,” Proceedings IEEE WiOpt’05, Riva del Garda (TN), Italy, April 2005.
