The increasing demand for ubiquitous, high-speed and high-performance Internet access challenges the economic viability of mobile network operators which cannot cope with the rate of increase of wireless traffic. Alternate means are considered to deal with the excessive traffic demand that exploit the increase of wireless networks in unlicensed parts of the spectrum, as well as of handheld devices with multiple radio interfaces.

In this talk, I will discuss an architecture called Energy Aware Disaster Recovery Network using WiFi Tethering (E-DARWIN). The underlying idea is to seamlessly integrate mobile devices carried by the people in a disaster area into the emergency response network by exploiting the WiFi tethering capability that is ubiquitously available in nearly all smartphones already.

Due to the surging increase in data traffic demand, operators try to enhance the coverage and network capacity by intensive spatial reuse. The limiting factor in networks with high spatial reuse is aggregate network interference, which depends strongly on the locations of the interferers.

In a multi-channel wireless network, each node is able to use multiple non-overlapping frequency channels, by having more network interface cards.

Despite the growing popularity of virtualized services, privacy in the cloud remains an unresolved problem. Companies, such as Turbo Tax, are selling services that prepare income tax returns on-line, in the cloud. However, when the Turbo Tax computer site is compromised, all of its customer’s personal data will be released. Experience dictates that all computer sites are eventually hacked or compromised by human failures.

Several challenges persist in what concerns wireless sensor networks, the Internet of Things, and the use of these technologies in human-centric environments.

The rising number of mobile devices and their increasing computational capabilities enable new interactive context-sensitive applications.

In today’s vertiginous business landscape, organizations are constantly looking at ways of introducing agility and cost efficiencies.

Recently, the University of Leon with the support of the Spanish National Institute of Cybersecurity has established the Research Institute of Applied Sciences in Cybersecurity (RIASC). This new institute has three main missions: research, education and transfer technology in cybersecurity. In this framework, RIASC has launched (jointly with other national and international institutions) the research Project MITHRA – “Multi-distributed Intelligence Towards Higher Resilience Assets”. 

Today the Internet, as we know it, stands as an increasingly important element in every societal domain. Never before have people (and machines) had such an amount of potential content at their fingertips (or interfaces), and different ways to share it.