September at NSLab: three papers, one workshop, four cities

September took NSLab to four conferences on two continents.

At IEEE VTC2026-Fall in Boston, Alex Piccioni presented Optimizing Urban Air Mobility Communications via O-RAN-Based Traffic Steering (A. Piccioni, A. Marotta, C. Rinaldi, D. Cassioli, F. Graziosi). Aerial traffic concentrates on a handful of cells and congests them; the paper shows how O-RAN traffic steering can redistribute that load across neighbouring cells, exploiting the predictability of aerial trajectories.

At IEEE WF-PST in Boulder, Colorado, Alex also presented Reliability-Aware AP Clustering for Disaster-Resilient Cell-Free Massive MIMO (A. Piccioni, H. Ghazal, R. Valentini, A. Marotta). When a disaster takes out radio sites, cell-free massive MIMO should keep users connected: the paper proposes a reliability-aware selection of each user's serving access points that favours spatial diversity over raw channel strength, without requiring location data.

At DS-RT in Padova, Carlo Centofanti presented SANDRAN: A Modular System-Level Simulator for Real-Time Evaluation of 6G Radio Access Networks (A. Piccioni, K. Kondepu, A. Marotta), a snapshot-based simulator for fast evaluation of latency, throughput and outage in 6G scenarios such as UAM, O-RAN and multi-connectivity, designed to complement heavier event-driven tools.

Finally, on 29 September in Rome, NSLab co-organized ERN 2026, the first Workshop on Experimental Research on Networking, held in conjunction with NoF 2026: half a day dedicated to results obtained on real hardware and real testbeds. Read more about ERN 2026.