UMOBILE Documentation

Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH) was established in July 1973. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of DUTH was founded in 1975, in Xanthi, Greece. The Department is one of the leading European Departments in Space Technology and Internetworking and has significant expertise in various Computer Science fields such as Algorithms, Information Retrieval and Security.

The Internetworked Systems Lab (InterSys – www.intersys-lab.org) is the sole laboratory of the Software Division of the Department. It is directed by Prof. V. Tsaoussidis and consists of 7 faculty members, 2 technicians, 3 administrative assistants, 3 senior engineers and 17 engineers. The expertise of InterSys lies in Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN), design and evaluation of protocols for challenging environments, such as near and deep-space, or opportunistic terrestrial networks. InterSys research team also works on E2E protocols, security, load-balancing and energy-saving protocols. InterSys Lab established the first European “Space Internetworking Center - SPICE” (www.spice-center.org) in September 2010. The center includes a unique testbed for Europe, appropriate for evaluating Space and Internetworking protocols in challenging environments and includes satellite links, ground station hardware devices, protocols for delay-tolerant networks as well as for telemetry/telecommand. The testbed has also direct access to Hellas Sat. Intersys Lab has received funding from ESA and FP7 and coordinates large projects (some of which were ranked first in their respective category), such as ESA’s "Extending Internet into Space" and FP7 SPACE "Space-Data Routers" with a total budget over 5M Euros.

Role in UMOBILE project

DUTH is the coordinator of the project, taking responsibility for the overall project management, interaction with the European Commission, coordination with other projects and concerted efforts as appropriate, and for the proper operation of the consortium as a whole including the in-time delivery of results. In WP2, DUTH will contribute to the definition of system and network requirements from the perspective of delay-tolerant networking and utilize its experience in providing less-than-best-effort to users for the definition of user requirements. DUTH will lead WP3 and will work on the definition of the architectural framework of Bundle Protocol (BP) within UMOBILE platform by building the required convergence layers for underlying protocols and contributing to the development of the smart routing mechanism. In WP4, DUTH will also use their experience on data dissemination over DTN towards achieving the dissemination of local knowledge and the provisioning of multiple levels of QoS. As part of UMOBILE evaluation in WP5, DUTH will perform simulations (using Opportunistic Network Environment simulator and NS-2 DTN agent), emulations (using SPICE DTN testbed) and will participate in the field trials of UMOBILE platform. Finally, DUTH will contribute to scientific exploitation and incorporation into education by undertake the responsibility to participate in conference keynotes and related panels, adopt UMOBILE results in academic courses and participate in (pre-)standardisation committees such as CCSDS and GAIA.