Abstract
A common problem in networking research and development is the duplicate effort of writing simulation and implementation code of routing protocols. This can be avoided by reusing simulation code in real prototyping and in production environments. In ns-3, emulation mode can be used to run simulation models of routing and Software Defined Networking (SDN) protocols on top of real L2 interfaces such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Although this feature is already available, the additional packet processing involved degrades the performance of the nodes and limits the amount of network traffic that can be processed. Our proposal to overcome this performance bottleneck consists in moving the data plane processing operations to outside of the ns-3 process, running such operations natively in the host Operating System (OS). Two approaches are proposed: (a) running the data plane in user space (DPU); (b) running the data plane in kernel space (DPK). Both approaches support the emulation of one or multiple nodes per emulation host machine. The experimental results show that the DPU and DPK approaches significantly improve the throughput by respectively 4.9 and 19 times when compared against traditional ns-3 emulation of a single node. For multiple nodes, the DPK approach further improves the throughput by as much as 23 times. The amount of code reuse is high - e.g., for the routing protocols used in this paper, only 1.4% and 11% of extra code is required to benefit from the performance improvements achieved respectively by the DPK and DPU approaches.

Abstract
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks have gained popularity due to their robustness, cost advantage, network efficiency and openness. Unfortunately, the same properties that foster their success, also make them prone to several attacks. To mitigate these attacks, several scalable security mechanisms which are based on the concepts of trust and reputation have been proposed. These proposed methods tend to ignore some core practical requirements that are essential to make them more useful in the real world. Some of such requirements include efficient bootstrapping of each newcomer's reputation, and mitigating seeder(s) exploitation. Additionally, although interaction among participating peers is usually the bases for reputation, the importance given to the frequency of interaction between the peers is often minimized or ignored. This can result in situations where barely known peers end-up having similar trust scores to the well-known and consistently cooperative nodes. After a careful review of the literature, this work proposes a novel and scalable reputation based security mechanism that addresses the aforementioned problems. The new method offers more efficient reputation bootstrapping, mitigation of bandwidth attack and better management of interaction rate, which further leads to improved fairness. To evaluate its performance, the new reputation model has been implemented as an extension of the BitTorrent protocol. Its robustness was tested by exposing it to popular malicious behaviors in a series of extensive PeerSim simulations. Results show that the proposed method is very robust and can efficiently mitigate popular attacks on P2P overlay networks.

Abstract
Robotics competitions are a way to challenge researchers, roboticists and enthusiastic to address robot applications. One of the well-known international competition is the Micromouse where the fastest mobile robot to solve a maze is the winner. There are several topics addressed in this competition such as robot prototyping, control, electronics, path planning, optimization, among others while keeping the size of the robot as small as possible. A simulation can be used to speed-up the development and testing algorithms but faces the gap between a simulation and reality, specially in the dynamics behaviour. There are some simulation environments that allow to simulate the Micromouse competition, but in this paper, an Hardware-in-the-loop simulator tool is presented where the simulated robot is controlled by the same microcontroller used by the robot. By this way, the developed algorithms are tested and validated with the limitations and constraints presented in the real hardware, such as memory and processing capabilities. The robot dynamics, the slippage of the wheels, the friction and the 3D visualization are present in the simulator. The presented results show that the same code and hardware controlling the simulated and the real robot identically.

Abstract
The Portuguese generation system includes a large amount of wind parks plus a rapidly increasing capacity in PV units. These units as well as some other technologies are classified as Special Regime Generation, SRG, and are paid feed in tariffs. The operation planning for the next day is based on estimates of these injections made in the morning of the day before operation. Then on the operation day, the wind and PV generations will likely be different originating the activation of reserves, namely automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve, aFRR, and Replacement Reserve, RR. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to report the research that was conducted to check whether the large amount of wind and PV capacities explain the amounts of contracted and mobilized aFRR and RR reserves. To do this we used data for 2016 publicly available on the web page of the Portuguese TSO. The clarification of this issue is relevant because the amount of money required to pay reserves has been increasing in recent years and this amount is internalized in the Access Tariffs paid by all Portuguese consumers.

Abstract
Electric Vehicles (EVs) sales are increasing in the recent years due to several factors such as cost reduction, fuel cost increase, pollution reductions, government incentives, among others. At the same time, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are continuously improving, and researchers use different simulators in order to test their proposals before implementing them in real devices. However, traditional communications-aimed simulations do not include fuel consumption issues that are a key factor in transportation systems. This paper presents the addition of Electric Vehicles consumption to the ns-3 simulator, which currently is one of the most used network simulators. Our proposal follows all the models, coding style, as well as engineering guidelines of ns-3, coupled with the characteristics of each vehicle, to accurately estimate the energy consumption. We also analyze the performance of our proposal while simulating a part of the E313 highway, located in Antwerp, Belgium. In particular, we compare the ns-3 results obtained in terms of energy consumption to those obtained in SUMO. In addition, we study the impact of our proposal on the overall simulation time.

Abstract
Companies that faces transport challenges and require logistics efficiency need to implement solutions based on automation, provided in Industry 4.0. Intelligent Logistics Management, satisfying the demanding requirements of the customer, using new technologies and advanced tools to control and to act along the supply chain are mandatory. To address this topic, this paper presents an application of an Automated Intelligent Vehicle.