This book explores the issues of transformation phenomena of the urban dimension (regionalization processes) that traditional scientific literature fails to describe appropriately. So far, scholars have adopted a widespread dominant perspective that proved unable to grasp the essence of post-modern complexities that urban spaces imply. The book provides a taxonomy, in order to describe the rules of these new and peculiar cities, by using the living dimension as a device for the epistemological breaking down of traditional socio-spatial analyses. After a thorough theoretical introduction, it describes two Sicilian case studies that prove particularly relevant to the construction of a new, alternative urban regionalization theory. These two areas, Palermo and South-Eastern Sicily, are described through several aspects, such as the role of migrants and migrations in defining urban regionalization, the power of fiction and the new urban forms that are slowly emerging in Sicily. Overall, this book provides a refreshing view of what Sicily has been and is becoming, by deconstructing most of its cliches and suggesting theoretical perspectives grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analyses.

This book focuses on emerging technologies in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) namely efficient information dissemination between vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and public transportation systems. It covers the state-of-the-art of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), with centralized and decentralized (Peer-to-Peer) communication architectures, considering several application scenarios. With a detailed treatment of emerging communication paradigms, including cross networking and distributed algorithms. Unlike most of the existing books, this book presents a multi-layer overview of information dissemination systems, from lower layers (MAC) to high layers (applications). All those aspects are investigated considering the use of mobile devices, such as smartphones/tablets and embedded systems, i.e. technologies that during last years completely changed the current market, the user expectations, and communication networks. The presented networking paradigms are supported and validated by means of extensive simulative analysis and real field deployments in different application scenarios. This book represents a reference for professional technologist, postgraduates and researchers in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), wireless communication and distributed systems.

This book explores the issues of transformation phenomena of the urban dimension (regionalization processes) that traditional scientific literature fails to describe appropriately. So far, scholars have adopted a widespread dominant perspective that proved unable to grasp the essence of post-modern complexities that urban spaces imply. The book provides a taxonomy, in order to describe the rules of these new and peculiar cities, by using the living dimension as a device for the epistemological breaking down of traditional socio-spatial analyses. After a thorough theoretical introduction, it describes two Sicilian case studies that prove particularly relevant to the construction of a new, alternative urban regionalization theory. These two areas, Palermo and South-Eastern Sicily, are described through several aspects, such as the role of migrants and migrations in defining urban regionalization, the power of fiction and the new urban forms that are slowly emerging in Sicily. Overall, this book provides a refreshing view of what Sicily has been and is becoming, by deconstructing most of its cliches and suggesting theoretical perspectives grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analyses.

This book focuses on emerging technologies in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) namely efficient information dissemination between vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and public transportation systems. It covers the state-of-the-art of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), with centralized and decentralized (Peer-to-Peer) communication architectures, considering several application scenarios. With a detailed treatment of emerging communication paradigms, including cross networking and distributed algorithms. Unlike most of the existing books, this book presents a multi-layer overview of information dissemination systems, from lower layers (MAC) to high layers (applications). All those aspects are investigated considering the use of mobile devices, such as smartphones/tablets and embedded systems, i.e. technologies that during last years completely changed the current market, the user expectations, and communication networks. The presented networking paradigms are supported and validated by means of extensive simulative analysis and real field deployments in different application scenarios. This book represents a reference for professional technologist, postgraduates and researchers in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), wireless communication and distributed systems.