European Community Research Projects

TeamAware is a project completely funded by EC under the H2020 program and is related to a new integrated approach for the efficiency and safety of first responders. It aims at the creation of a new technical and informative structure to improve crisis management, the flexibility and response capacities of first responders from different specialized areas (e. g. Firefighters, Security Forces). The aim of the project is to build an integrated “cost-effective” system to increase awareness of the situation for rescuers, through heterogeneous and non-interoperable sensory systems, both wearable and external.
The response of the project goes through the construction of an integrated multisensory system to track operators in indoor environments (unavailable GNSS), monitor the behaviour and health of individuals, detect harmful chemicals and explosions, ensure safe connections, use AI tools to obtain fused, refined and easily understandable data through human-machine interfaces. In this framework DUNE participate with its localisation system ARIANNA that will be tailored to the needs of the project.

In the context of Clean Sky EU Project, Dune has turned out winner of the INSAT project which involves the construction of a Test Bench for the new aircrafts Tilt Rotors Nextgen in development by Leonardo Helicopters SpA.

The new test bench is characterized by the ability to perform a series of ATP (Acceptance Test Procedures) in an automatic or semi-automatic manner, stimulating the various Nextgen equipment with appropriate signals and measuring the characteristics of the same number of signals produced by the stimulation ones. The ATP procedure is performed very quickly, a report of this procedure is produced indicating, for each test, the result obtained in numerical form as well as the outcome of the test itself. The INSAT system has the ability to provide active assistance to the user when a particular test is not passed. In particular, it is able to provide hypotheses of malfunctioning or incorrect wiring according to the results obtained.
The development of INSAT was started by referring to the electrical tests of the Nextgen. To deal with this need 2 ad hoc electronic drawers were constructed. The first drawer serves to extradite the signals coming from the multiple measurement points to a multimeter. The second drawer instead produces a series of controlled power supplies so as to be able to emulate the aircraft’s generators and its own GCUs (Generator Control Units). The architecture we have conceived is of the General Purpose type and therefore easily usable in other avionic and industrial equipment. The ATP procedure is managed by an easily reconfigurable SW.

Protect is a project funded by the EC under the SME Instrument Phase 2 that offers small and medium-sized businesses funding for innovation projects and supports services to help their commercialisation.

Protect provides the tools to market Arianna that is based on the creation of a wearable device for pedestrian localization in indoor environments in which the GPS signal is not reachable.

With the Protect project, the EC also provided resources to improve the device from an engineering point of view and to do marketing, provided a coach for marketing assistance and for the production of a video teaser assuring resources for participation in exhibitions and advertising.

Distributed computing, storage and radio resource allocation over cooperative femtocells (FP7, European Commission, Information Communication Technologies (ICT), contract ICT-318784 –TROPIC

Femtocell networks are currently seen as a new communication paradigm for the ever increasing ubiquitous wireless traffic demands. Being pervasive by nature, its proximity to the subscriber opens a new world of possibilities for the development of applications. Among them, cloud computing services demanded by smartphones could be moved from large server farms to HeNBs, provided that these are equipped with computational and storage resources, thus improving user experience on latency and download/upload speed. TROPIC addresses this scenario by exploiting advanced MP2MP communication schemes, innovative virtualization procedures, and a cross-layer approach to the allocation of resources understood in a wide sense: radio, computational/storage capacity and energy. TROPIC work programme includes the definition and characterization of the system level building blocks and their required interfaces for the implementation of a full system emulator and the development of a proof of concept platform.

Femtocell-based network Enhancement by interference management and coordination of information for seamless connectivity (FP7, European Commission, Information Communication Technologies (ICT), contract ICT-248891 – FREEDOM)

FREEDOM faces key technical and industrial topics about the foreseen mid-term massive deployment of femtocells. To this purpose a new approach based on cooperative/coordination paradigms, enabled by the quality-limited Internet Service Provider (ISP) backhaul link is adopted.

Activities : 

• design of interference-aware cooperative PHY techniques;
• improvement of the control plane procedures for seamless connectivity;
• system-level evaluation;
• hardware demonstration of the proposed femto-based network architecture.

Reconfigurable OFDMA-based cooperative networks enabled by agile SpecTrum use (FP7, Information Communication Technologies (ICT), contract 215282 – ROCKET)

ROCKET aims at provisioning a ubiquitous wireless solution to reach bit rates higher than 100Mbps with peak throughputs higher than 1Gbps, based on Reconfigurable OFDMA Cooperative Networks enabled by agile spectrum use.

DUNE was in charge of:

• contributing to the requirements definitions for the spatial radio multipath channel,
• analysing the proposed cooperation strategies, also proposing different suboptimal approaches, less demanding for computational effort or signaling requirements,
• supporting the Advanced Antenna Techniques carrying on the analysis of the optimisation strategies and the relevant performance evaluation by simulation.

SELF CONFIGURABLE AIR INTERFACE (SURFACE)(European Commission, Information Societies Technologies Program (EC-IST), contract 27187 – SURFACE)

In the context of 3G medium and long term evolution, synthesis and performance evaluation of a novel generalized self-configurable radio interface for interworking at physical layer among access technologies such as DS-CDMA, MC-CDMA and OFDM . Development of :

• complexity vs. performance effective transmission and reception architectures comprising Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas
• performance evaluation of the proposed architectures when integrated in the whole network
• air interface emulator
• hardware optimization and complexity evaluation

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS WITH SELF-ORGANIZATION CAPABILITIES FOR CRITICAL AND EMERGENCY APPLICATIONS (WINSOC)(European Commission, Information Societies Technologies Program (EC-IST), WINSOC

The scope is to design, build and test an innovative self-organizing prototype, highly scalable wireless sensor network. The network is based neither on layered protocols nor on centralized data-fusion, thus avoiding the associated signal overhead, complexity and power consumption. 

• analysis of bio-inspired sensors and communication concept
• analysis of the network emergent behaviour
• estimation capabilities of the network as a whole.

ADVANCED ALGORITHMS FOR WIRELESS MULTI-HOP NETWORKS (ROMANTIK)(European Commission, Information Societies Technologies Program (EC-IST), contract 32549 – ROMANTIK)

ROMANTIK develops and evaluates “structured” and “ad-hoc” multi-hop radio networks as well as intelligent relaying techniques for 3G+ and 4G mobile/wireless communication systems. The scope is to demonstrate the performance increase, such as the increased availability in wireless services and increased range, due to the adoption of multi-hop networks, in 3G and 4G wireless communication systems.

Development of :

• radio resources management algorithms
• strategies for relaying messages through the multi-hop network
• innovative radiolink algorithms for CDMA-TDD and OFDM validation.

TECHNOLOGIES OF SMART ANTENNAS FOR BROADBAND WIRELESS NETWORKS (SATURN)(European Commission, Information Societies Technologies Program (EC-IST), contract 10322 – SATURN)

The goal is to increase, by employing smart antennas, both the availability of broadband services (in two types of networks for mixed voice and data traffic) and the localization capability. The networks are UMTS and WLAN (local and campus area) based on HIPERLAN II standard. 

• project co-ordination
• synthesis of space-time codes for adaptive antennas with transmission diversity
• medium access techniques for packet transmission in WLAN networks
• experimental evaluation.

System Using Augmented Reality for Maintenance, Assembly, Training and Education – OPTICAL COMMUNICATION FOR AN INCREASED REALITY SYSTEM(European Commission, D.G. XIII, IST Program, Information Societies Technologies, IST contract -1999 – 10202 – STARMATE)

The STARMATE project specified, designed, developed and demonstrated a product dedicated to computer-guided maintenance of complex mechanical elements. The company work package was to study, design and develop a broadband system (> 100 Mbit/s) for voice and image data transmission between two users, one of which mobile, in an industrial environment. In a first phase the system is implemented by utilising multimode optical fibers. In a following evolution a wireless system was envisaged.

Shallow Water Acoustic communication Network (SWAN) SUBMARINE ACOUSTICAL COMMUNICATION NETWORK IN SHALLOW WATER(European Commission, D.G. XII, MAST-3 Program, MArine Science and Technology, EC-MAS3 Contract-CT97-0107)

Synthesis of robust digital communication techniques for non stationary transmission channels affected by severe multipath. 

• project co-ordination
• synthesis of space-time algorithms for multi-channel identification/equalisation and symbol estimation
• symbol estimation in the absence of training signals (cycle stationary and blind processing)
• network access protocols in a high latency environment
• experimental verification by collecting data at sea in the continental shelf close to the Dutch coast.