O projeto mobilizador nº 46078 - Smart Farm tem como objetivo facilitar a transição para agricultura digital das explorações agrícolas, independentemente da sua dimensão, por via de : Conceber e desenvolver soluções acessíveis com base nas tecnologias, para a aplicação em horti, fruti e viticultura; Dinamizar práticas de agricultura sustentável, preditiva, autónoma e geradoras de elevado valor acrescentado, na região oeste, e a nível nacional e internacional. Soluções inteligentes para uma agricultura sustentável, preditiva e autónoma.

The main technical objectives are to develop a high-performance heterogeneous access network by considering a flexible C-RANbased architecture, and integrating mmW communications with conventional radio-wave communication systems, joint cognition andcooperative schemes, efficient and joint cross-layer approaches in the management of radio and FH/BH resources. To reach the abovemain goals, specific research objectives are:• Design and evaluate new interference management (based on pre-coding for the downlink and cooperative equalization for theuplink) and joint scheduling mechanisms to mitigate interference through cooperation. These will be enhanced with the knowledge ofthe interference obtained through spectrum sensing and cognitive radio techniques.• Development of new methods for reducing the load in the BH/FH. This includes new methods for the acquisition/dissemination of theinformation required for coordination / cooperation as well as compression algorithms, namely for the case of Remote Radio Heads(RRH) employing both mmW and MMIMO.• PURE-5GNET will propose a functional split between the data and control planes for UDNs and also defines necessary interfacesamong these functional blocks such as AP/UE dual-band discovery, mmW beamforming and link establishment, and resourceallocation and packet transmission procedures.• PURE-5GNET will propose a converged backhaul and RRM mechanism in particular for the joint management of the resources in theradio and BH/FH domains (optical and wireless).• Development of an experimental testbed including FPGAs supporting the selected algorithms and optical links. This testbed will beintegrated in the IT infrastructure ORCIP.

The support for sub millisecond extreme low latency (ELL) is an open issue for the emerging cellular Machine-Type Communication (MTC) networks, currently not supported by cellular networks. ELL is required for vehicular safety, autonomous driving applications and for other MTC that have arisen with the advent of the Internet of Things, and for new human-initiated (HI) communications, such as tactile Internet applications. This project addresses the design of the last mile of a wireless communication network capable of supporting end-to-end ELL for thousands of MTC and HI devices per access node with improved energy efficiency. A capillary network of small cells will be considered. The project will focus on the design of new physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols, and of network services, to support MTC ELL communications. Several components will be integrated:- Spectral efficient PHY-layer modulation schemes (MS) with reduced out-of-band (OOB) spectral leakage, that do not require synchronous reception and minimize MTC initial transmission delay; - Asynchronous Multiple MultiPacket Reception (MPR) techniques, to maximize the capacity to handle load peaks, reducing the initial contention delay;- Advanced sensing techniques that estimate the number of devices transmitting concurrently;- Interference management (IM) through a radio resource management (RRM) service, which combines base station (BS) and device sensing;- Coarse-synchronized MAC protocols designed to support a fast initial transmission and optimized subsequent ones, using the RRM service’s information;- Power saving (PS) mechanisms compatible with ELL;- Cloud-based radio access network (C-RAN), to support a flexible on-demand implementation of spatial based MPR techniques, capable of satisfying the strict ELL requirements.The research team is organized into a PHY layer group and a MAC (and upper) layers group, which in the past collaborated in the design of cross-layer projects. Lu...

The main technical objectives of the project are to design, implement and validate a set of techniques that enables efficient coexistence of heterogeneous systems (macro and smallcells). The aim is to design and demonstrate practical joint cooperative and cognitive transmission/reception techniques to improve the user’s fairness and throughput of the entire network. The specific objectives include:•Design linear precoding techniques to mitigate both intra-system (on each smallcell or macro-cell) and inter-systems (smallcell/macrocell) interferences. We consider that some terminals are equipped with cognitive capabilities to efficient design the precoders, namely the ones used to mitigate the inter-system interference. •Design joint precoding and detection techniques for uplink to mitigate both intra/inter-system interferences. The aim is to combine the interference alignment with efficient equalization schemes (e.g. IB-DFE based ones).•Design efficient signaling strategies both for the feedback of wireless link information and distribution among the cooperating network elements, aiming to optimize the trade-off between achieved performance and signaling overhead. Moreover, particular emphasis will be placed on inter-system feedback and quantization strategies. •Assessment and validation of the proposed downlink and uplink algorithms under realist scenarios, trough a multilink level simulator based on LTE specification.•Development of an FPGA based testing infrastructure allowing to experimentally show the feasibility of the proposed algorithms. We extend the FPGA infrastructure developed in the previous IT/CELCOP project for the envisioned heterogeneous network. Selected algorithms (the simplest ones) will be tested in this infrastructure. Besides these technical objectives we also aim and consider of high importance the following objectives,•Attract students for a career in R&D in the field of telecommunications. •Promotion of research collaborations between re...

This project aims to integrate MPR, IC, PHY-cooperation, CRD and AM technologies in a single architecture particularly tailored for ILWNs, which is itself a challenging task due to the lack of a central coordinator and the spatial distribution of the nodes. The maingoal of the project is to investigate if the theoretical capacity of ILWNs can be achieved by practicalcommunication systems, or at least evaluate how far an optimized solution, such as the one proposed in this project, is from thetheoretical capacity bound. The communication systems’ architecture proposed for each node will be based on a cross-layeringdesign between the physical and the MAC sub-layer.

The main objective of the project ?Quality Control on the Go? (QC OTG) is the development of a tool, integrated in the process of capture and ingest, which enables the analysis, in real time, of the quality of audio-visual content in three dimensions - video, audio and file container - in an automatic way and compliant with acquisition systems based on files and SDI . This project is promoted by the consortium formed by MOG Technologies (leader), IST, ISCTE-IUL and IPN. The new product to be developed under the scope of this project is targeted at the audio-visual and broadcast sectors (especially producers of audio-visual content), presenting a set of innovative features, of which we highlight: analysis, detection of artifacts of audio and video contents in various formats (already available or near completion, as for example Sony XAVC) and with different targets (UHDTB, HDTV, Internet, Mobile); Fully integration of the features of capture and ingest with the system of quality control of the video, audio, and file container, ensuring the operation proceeds at real time; Integration of a library with a wide range of modular functions that enable extraction and analysis of information of video and audio (semantic and syntactic); Higher efficiency of the ingest process by introducing a single step of quality control therefore reducing the necessary computational resources.Aiming at fulfilling the goals and innovative characteristics that the project proposes, the consortium has established a methodology that comprises research and industrial development activities, counting with the involvement of a total of 26 human resources of the consortium and with a total investment of 1.192.093,72 Euros (including the acquisition of equipment and expenses with activities of promotion and dissemination of the results).

The project will take LTE-Advanced as a reference and will explore possible enhancements to the support of femtocells. It will use mechanisms to reduce the interference-limited transmission with full frequency reuse. These include CQI, QoS- and interference- aware scheduling and RRM with user-grouping, coordinated RRM, exploiting the spatial degrees of freedoms from multi-antenna systems and OFDMA through MIMO and beam forming techniques, active interference management and CoMP transmission, as well as carrier aggregation for multi-band transmission.New technologies like aggregate carriers and cooperative multi antennas antenna systems as part of LTE-Advanced systems will be evaluated with respect to their ability to enhance the performance of networked femtocells based on LTE-A. The availability of Positioning information, can help provide the network with information on the terminal positions and, with this, to adapt the transmission scheme to the terminal avoiding worst channel conditions.At the network layer, considerable research and development has been recently focused on the use of small cellular base stations. However, those cells have only been considered as mere extensions to cellular networks, allowing the enlargement of service coverage. The use of these small cells, mostly deployed by consumers, has not yet been fully explored. There are many services and protocols in the network that could benefit on the scattering of this kind of cell deployment. This project will exploit the opportunities that small cells will bring to improvement on the network architecture. The aim is to a achieve a much richer small cell, that will provide better support for several services and protocols that could take advantage on a distributed architecture and/or context ware and localized information.Femtocells can have many benefits for both operators and users. From an operational or deployment perspective however their integration into the network is quite hard. From the ...

The main objective of SAAS is to develop an UAV remote control system that is mostly independent of a specific vehicle model or design and that makes use of the available terrestrial wireless networks. The individual challenges and objectives to be addressed are:• Real-Time Video Transmission and Control using Terrestrial Wireless Networks: Investigate the possibility of transmitting real time video and control commands with adequate quality for a pilot to control and make decisions on the vehicle course using the available radio networks (GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, LTE).• Semi-autonomous Flight Control: Develop autonomous control capabilities for the aircraft to perform its self-rescue in the case of loss of radio connection and that can also allow a reduced piloting workload.• Remote Visualization and Control Application: Implement an application for tablet PCs that enables the visualization of the video captured by the aircraft cameras together with other telemetry information and allows the pilot to command the aircraft (either using the touchscreen, the accelerometers or an additional attached joystick).• Prototype Implementation and Flight Tests: Implement a prototype using a small rotary-wing aircraft (possibly a tricopter/quadcopter) and evaluate the performance in terms of video reception, control, and autonomy capability.

Future wireless systems are expected to support data rates of several hundreds of Mbit/s in a variety of scenarios with high spectral and power efficiencies. Due to high transmission rates the channel will be severely time dispersive. For this reason, block transmission techniques combined with frequency-domain equalization (such as, OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and SC-FDE (Single-Carrier Frequency-Domain Equalization) modulations schemes are strongly recommendable.A key technology to improve power and spectral efficiencies is the use of multi-antenna schemes exploiting spatial diversity (such as STF (Space-Time-Frequency) codes) and spatial multiplexing (such as LST (Layered Space-Time) techniques). The use of signals with reduced envelope fluctuations is also important to allow efficient power amplification. This is particularly important in the case of OFDM signals. Conventional FDE implementations require accurate channel estimates at the receiver, something particularly important in multi-antennas systems. These estimates can be obtained with the help of appropriate training symbols or blocks. Due to frequency offsets and Doppler effects, the channel is expected to change from block to block, or even within a given block, especially for large blocks, high carrier frequencies and/or high moving speeds. In this case, it might be recommendable to employ non-coherent systems.This project considers efficient transmission schemes for frequency-selective channels. For this reason, we will employ OFDM and SC-FDE block transmission formats with multi-antenna schemes. The research team involved in this project includes researchers working in transmission, codebook and receiver design and optimization, as well as researchers working on propagation issues. In the first phase of this project, we address the problem of STF codebook design for both coherent and non-coherent communications. In contrast with conventional approaches, the codebook design take...

The main goal of COILS is the design and evaluation of efficient methods for the provision of broadband services and applications based on MBMS to groups of mobile users located mainly in Personal Cells. The use of MBMS over Personal Cells will support the efficient use of radio and network resources, while also providing rich context information to applications and services. Merging these two frameworks promises enhanced multimedia application provisioning, benefiting end users and operators alike. The technologies investigated during the course of the project will generate considerable novel intellectual property that will become the property of IT.

New RAN technologies and IMS to support future MBMS based on Long term Evolution of 3GPP

This project aims at building a satellite ground station at the Ku band that can be remotely controlled and accessed through a dedicated server to all authorized users using a simple web browser connected to the internet anywhere in the world. Authorized users can request and collect data (telemetry, images, etc) from its database for post-processing. This equipment can be used for a great variety of experiments not previously possible at this location and can be an important factor to increase the cooperation amongst national and international researchers and institutions, namely with ESA. Its location and features are unique and can be of strategic importance for the development of national research and industry in this field.

B-BONE main objective is to further enhance UMTS capacity, transmission rates, RAN and Core network functionalities, considering both FDD and TDD modes, so as to accommodate digital broadcasting/multicasting (multimedia) type services.

SEACORN provides a fundamental contribution to the evaluation and development of Enhanced UMTS networks. It covers several aspects starting from the definition and characterisation of services and user profiles, including the modelling of the user's behaviour with respect to mobility and multimedia activity, and finally considering the optimisation of the networks from both points of views: the operator's and manufacturer's view of limiting the infrastructure and maintenance costs and the user's view of being provided with high quality services