I am an Associate Professor at the Ca’ Foscari university of Venice and I do research on networks.

In the first part of my career I mainly focused on network security, while currently I am modelling, understanding, and improving large scale distributed wireless networks, such as Community Networks or next generation wireless backhauls. I work on the routing protocols, the scalability and on various networking aspects.

I was also among the founders of Tracking4Fun, a start-up that provides localization devices for athletes.

You are very welcome to roam through my website, and contact me if you are interested in my work. You can contact me at leonardo.maccari@unive.it.

Career

  • 2019-

    University of Venice

    I become an Associate Professor at the Ca'Foscari University of Venice, in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics (DAIS)

  • 2011-2019

    University of Trento

    I was at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at the university of Trento (DISI), first as a Marie Curie fellow, then as an Assistant Professor

  • 2010

    Selex Communications

    I spent a year in the labs of Selex Communications (now Leonardo Finmeccanica) in a joint project between Selex and the University of Florence

  • 2005-2009

    University of Florence

    After my master in Computer Science I got a PhD and worked in the Department of Electronics and Communications (now department of Information Engineering) at the university of Florence

Teaching

In Ca' Foscari I am the lecturer of three university courses.

Lab of Computer Security

In the Data Management Bachelor degree in H-Farm, I am professor of a security lab course.

Wireless Networking Fundamentals

In the Computer Science Bachelor, I am the professor of networking course. You can find more details on this dedicated page.

Computer Science

In the Physical Engineering Bachelor, I am the professor of the Computer Science course.

Introduction to Coding and Data Management

In the Data Management Bachelor degree in H-Farm, I am professor of the first module of this course.

Publications

This is just a short list of recent, selected publications. For a full list see my list of publications

.

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 2022

Elsevier Computer Communications 2021

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing 2020

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 2019

IEEE Transactions on Networking 2018

IEEE Infocom 2018

IEEE Infocom 2016

Elsevier Ad-Hoc Networks 2015

Projects

This is just a list of relevant competitive projects I participated to, gray background means I had a coordination role. For a full list (including industrial projects) see my CV

Open and Resilient Radio Access Network for Next Generation Wireless Backhauls (OR2AN2G)

OR2AN2G is a cooperation project between Ca'Foscari University of Venice and the North Eastern University of Boston. Our works on the topology modelling of mmWave backhaul networks is tested on the Colosseum testbed to study, for the first time, multi-hop backhaul networks on 5G/6G in realistic conditions.

netCommons

netCommons was an Horizon2020 project proposing a novel transdisciplinary methodology to promote and support the creation of network infrastructures as commons, for resiliency, sustainability, democracy, self-determination, and social integration. It lasted for the period 2016-2019 and I was the technical WP coordinator.

PAF-FPE

PAF-FPE was my Marie Curie project, which studied wireless pervasive networks (such as multi-hop ad-hoc social networks and wireless community networks) to realise new security techniques aimed at improving their security

IoF: Internet on FIRE

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the glue that binds pieces of the Internet and keeps global communications in tune. BGP has a slow convergence: two configuration parameters have a high impact on BGP convergence speed, but there is no consensus on how to change their default value to a better one. IoF addresses this problem in the Fed4Fire+ open call #5.

POPROW: Pop­Routing On WiSHFUL

The goal of POPROW was to test and enhance “Pop-Routing”, a technique for wireless mesh link-state routing protocols that tunes the generation frequency of control messages independently for each node of a wireless mesh network as the result of real-time graph analysis performed on the network topology. POPROW was financed by the WiSHFUL FIRE project.

RiseAPP

RiseApp was an idea financed by the CHEST project. It produced the design of a mobile app to share and publish media in risky situations (protests and manifestations) when Internet connectivity is filtered or temporarily blocked.

WCN: A Novel Techno-Legal Approach

A multi-disciplinary effort to study the legal implications of the use and the mis-use of a WCN and to produce technical countermeasures applicable in the loosely-organized social environment of a WCN in order to strengthen the legal position of the people in the community when a user of the network misbehaves. Financed by the University of Trento via a an internal competitive call

OSPS

Confine was a FP7 FIRE project devoted to the study of Wireless Community Networks. We entered the project via a call for sub-projects with the OSPS proposal, that dealt with live video streaming on community networks.

No Cat Community

A project financed by the Caritro foundation to perform a multi-disciplinary study on wireless community networks. It involved the Law department of our university, and the sociology department of the university of Padua.

Programmable Networks

Information-aware data plane for programmable networks is project that started in 2015 with the goal to contribute to the deployment of a high-quality/cost-effective network infrastructure via an enhanced data-plane, which is able to serve the increasing traffic demand generated by a variable set of applications. Financed by EIT-ICT labs.

ESSOR

ESSOR goal was to provide the architecture of Software Defined Radio (SDR) for military purposes and a military. It involved major European universities and industries.

NI2S3

The main objective of the FP7 NI2S3 project was to research and implement a reference methodology for developing security systems based on network enabled capabilities information and integration services for critical infrastructures

PROFILES

PROFILES was a two-year Italian research project partially supported by MIUR under the PRIN funding program 2007-2008. The project addressed the study of peer-to-peer communication systems

CRUISE

CRUISE, an FP6 network of Excellence, intended to be a focal point in the planning and coordination of research on communication and application aspects of wireless sensor networking in Europe

Cooperations

Some of the institutions and companies I cooperated with. For a full list see my CV

NEU logo

NorthEastern University

I had/have several activities with the group of professor Tommaso Melodia: papers, visits, shared students.

UPC logo

BarcelonaTech

I had/have several activities with the group of professor Leandro Navarro: papers, visits, shared students.

CNRS logo

CNRS

In the context of the netCommons project I started a cooperation with the CNRS group of Melanie Dulong de Rosnay on the definition of the legal status of community networks.

AUEB logo

AUEB

In the context of the netCommons project I started a cooperation with the lab of Iordanis Koutsopoulos of AUEB with whom we are working on the application of centrality metrics to community networks analysis.

UoW logo

University of Westminster

In the context of the netCommons project I started a cooperation with Christian Fuchs on the definition of a suitable sustainability concept for community networks.

Pastis logo

University of Padua

With the Pastis group of social science research in the university of Padua, we published 3 inter-dsciplinary publications dealing community networks.

sevilla logo

University of Sevilla

I have been visiting prof. Pablo Neira several times. Pablo is the main developer of the netfilter, the linux firewall, and we published a few joint papers on firewalling.

alcatel logo

Alcatel-Lucent

For an EIT project I cooperated with Alcatel-Lucent (Paris) to test and develop their high-performance programmable networking module.

telecom logo

Telecom Italia Lab

Telecom Italia is the largest Italian ISP. I participated to two projects financed by TiLab that lead to publications and patents.

selex logo

Selex ES

Selex is one of the largest Italian producer of telecommunication devices for professional markets. I participated to several projects and I am co-author of two patents.