UMOBILE Documentation

TECNALIA is the first leading private and independent research and technology organisation in Spain and the 5th largest in Europe, employing 1445 expert and international people (164 PhDs) and income of 118M€ and over 4.000 clients. TECNALIA operates in the following market sectors: Industry and Transport, ICT, Sustainable Construction, Energy and Environment, Innovation Systems, and Health and Quality of Life, and it is very active in FP7, participating up to June-2012 in 264 projects and coordinating 64 of them. We are also participating within the launching of the main KIC’s of the EIT, the KETs, the FET Flagships initiatives, towards the Horizon 2020 Programme, where TECNALIA is actively involved, as well as in the definition of other EU Work Programmes, through CDTI, EC, etc. TECNALIA has also key alliances with the main EU research centers through the EUROTECH, EARTO, JIIP, and ERANET AERTO.

TECNALIA has a good background in participating in EU funded project since FP6 programme. TECNALIA has been very active in FP7, participating in 264 projects and coordinating 64 of them. Besides, TECNALIA has a deep knowledge of FI-PPP (such as FI-WARE projects and related enablers to be used) and has also been involved in SAFECITY project (FI-PPP Phase 1) related to Smart City domain.

TECNALIA has also an organisational structure called VENTURES, to support the creation of Start-ups, entrepreneurship, business angels’ networks, etc., and an instrument called Inspiring Business Forum (IBF) with associated organisations to promote innovation.

TECNALIA has a Division in charge of providing internal support for I+D+i Programmes and managing the Innovation and research Unit of Prometeo technological platform, supported by CDTI.

TECNALIA has several collaboration alliances with the most important European industrial clusters such as Clusters: GAIA, AMETIC, DSP Valley, BICC-NET, CCAN, RedCI – Red Ciudades Inteligentes, among others. And with the most important European Research Centers as VTT, CEA, SINTEF, TNO, Fraunhofer, Joanneum Research under the alliance of JIIP, and the alliance of EUROTECH-EARTO. Among the Business Units in which the research activity of TECNALIA is divided, Telecom and Electronics emphasizes on the specific R&D needs of fields related to digital HW design and component integration, and wireless network deployments. With the aim of transferring value to the society through innovation and technology, Telecom and Electronics shows a high degree of specialization and focus on: ad-hoc embedded hardware design and prototyping, multicore computing, advanced FPGA-based design, indoor location solutions based on hybrid wireless technologies, sensor and actuator networks, Radio Frequency (RF) design, GNSS RFFrontends, among others. The Telecom and Electronics Business Unit provides a response to market and research demands in terms of capacity and velocity, competence, critical mass, qualified professionals, equipment and anticipation to technological changes.

Within the TELECOM Business Unit we have been working in ad-hoc and opportunistic networks for several years now, mainly involved in EU projects: 4WARD (ended in 2011) and SAIL (ended in 2013). Tecnalia’s expertise has been mainly focused on communications protocols and adaptations of these so as to follow specific design criteria. We worked with simulation environments for AODV (Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing) and OLSR (Optimised Link-State Routing), and also developed our own modifications of the protocols for their NS2 implementations. Tecnalia has developed a system to allocate virtual resources over mobile opportunistic physical topologies, which derived in a European PCT. More recently, the Telecom Unit evolved its approach towards Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), especially those based on human-carried devices. We designed and developed a modification to the so-called PRoPHET routing protocol, incorporating the metric of “contact-duration” to the route selection. Apart from this specific work, we also have experience working with 802.15.4 sensor-actuator nodes for a variety of applications.

Role in UMOBILE project

In this project Tecnalia plans to make extensive use of Telecom Unit’s expertise in the field of opportunistic networking and the implementation and deployment of DTN based topologies. The main contribution from Tecnalia will be based on the networking requirements specification within the envisaged scenarios (task T2.2) and the system deploy ability (task 2.3), the design of the DTN overlay in order to include the convergence and ICN layers demanded by the specific services (task 3.1) and the lead of smart routing approaches based on social interactions (task 3.3). During the platform integration and validation phase, Tecnalia will also participate in deploying test scenarios where main developments from WP3 can be validated as proof-of-concept (T5.3) so as to cover all demanded aspects from the use cases perspective.