There are many barriers to innovation in wireless communications. Inadequate documentation; uncooperative chipset manufacturers; a wide variety of hardware and software specifications; a steep learning curve during the experimentation phase; and difficulties in prototyping are among the main problems hindering development.The recently concluded European project WiSHFUL has successfully overcome some of these challenges. WiSHFUL, a research project funded by the EU's 2020 Future Internet Research & Experimentation (FIRE) Programme, addressed these challenges with the aim of stimulating greater wireless experimentation and innovation and providing control over different radio and network technologies, such as Wi-Fi and LTE, that share the same environment. However, effective innovation requires excellent experimentation – a requirement that has not always been possible given the complexity of the context created by competing wireless technologies. Thus, an additional objective of WiSHFUL was to provide experimenters with the opportunity to participate through an open call process. This allowed them to utilize and extend the WiSHFUL architecture, while also enabling innovations aimed at meeting the needs of specific wireless sectors. WiSHFUL's findings have proven highly relevant to both academic research and the industrial innovation process. The IMDEA Networks Institute has collaborated as an experimenter in this final but critical phase of the WiSHFUL project since July 2017. The work was carried out by the Institute's Pervasive Wireless Systems group, led by Dr. Domenico Giustiniano. A key achievement of the group has been the integration of a positioning system, developed and widely used by these researchers, and its experimental evaluation on the demanding WiSHFUL testbed. Another key achievement has been the study of intelligent algorithms for MAC resource allocation under challenging conditions (similar to industrial environments with many metallic surfaces), leveraging the contextual information provided by the positioning system and scheduling the experiments using the radio hardware and software support integrated into the WiSHFUL platform. The new system will enable early experimental research into applications of real-time location data and other contextual information in complex indoor environments to improve the efficiency of wireless networks. These environments can include a combination of static and mobile devices in densely populated networks. Shopping malls, office buildings, industrial facilities, and even the home are examples of environments where a large number of devices using different technologies can be found.
Bibliographic references:
Maurizio Rea, Domenico Garlisi, Héctor Cordobés de la Calle, Domenico Giustiniano (September 2018) Location-aware MAC Scheduling in Industrial-like Environment In: The 9th International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems (BROADNETS 2018), 19–20 September 2018, Faro, Portugal.
Maurizio Rea, Héctor Cordobés de la Calle, Domenico Giustiniano (April 2018) TWINS: Time-of-flight based Wireless Indoor Navigation System In: Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition - The 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2018), 11-13 April 2018, Porto, Portugal.
Maurizio Rea, Héctor Cordobés de la Calle, Domenico Giustiniano, Domenico Garlisi, Pierluigi Gallo, Spilios Giannoulis, Ingrid Moerman (October 2017) Poster: Integration of WiFi ToF Positioning System in the Open, Flexible and Adaptive WiSHFUL Architecture
Source(s): IMDEA Networks Institute
