The global COVID-19 crisis triggered major changes across societies around the world disrupting the way we live and conduct business. Across Europe, the measures and restrictions enforced due to the pandemic have led to sudden changes in many paradigms paving the way for new business models and market exchanges. This dramatic disruption has accelerated some socio-economic trends, which were visible before the COVID-19 crisis, such as the adoption of sophisticated technology and data solutions to facilitate human-centered, people-smart, and sustainable operation models; the incorporation of sustainability and climate mitigation as non-negotiable principles of operating and doing businesses and last but not least, relying on smart data evidence-based solutions to guide decision making for optimal commercial and sustainability performance. The tourism industry is one of the global economic sectors that is most severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated with its economic downturn, according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. UNWTO data states that the current crisis is responsible for a global fall in export revenues of between EUR 750-900 billion and a loss of direct jobs that could be between 100 and 200 million. With the fall in profits and lack of certainty for stable markets, the recovery shortly of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which according to UNWTO shoulder 80% of global tourism, is at stake. With lost revenues and subsequently, talent drain to other economic sectors, tourism SMEs face the need to adapt at a time of crisis with constraint capacities. Through the design of a dynamic technological solution (platform) for knowledge-transfer and experience exchange made available to a network of tourism SME clusters across six countries, this project will demonstrate how digitalization can accelerate innovation and uptake of new sustainability solutions in a sector that is built up mostly of small enterprises with limited resources for n...

One major goal in this project is to develop an analytical formulation,as well as a stochastic Monte-Carlo (MC) simulator, that allow us to study in a rigorous way the impact of in-band crosstalk, both incoherent and coherent, originated in CDC ROADMs in the performance of flexible grid networks, considering 16-QAM and 64-QAM 400 Gbps signals.On a network-side perspective, the emergence of modulation formats with higher-order constellations and, consequently, with stricter performance margins has increased the importance of physical impairment awareness in the network planning process. Thus, it is essential to incorporate the effects of in-band crosstalk, along with other effects, in an impairment-aware routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) framework. This framework should be able to efficiently provision paths and spectrum for superchannels based on M-QAM carriers in a CDC-ROADM network, while using the physical model as a performance validation tool for candidate optical paths

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.

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 project is focussed on research and development of 3D video perceptual quality monitoring in error prone networks, such as the near future 3DTV services over IP or DVB networks. The challenge is to establish a set of (Quality of Experience) QoE metrics and their relationship with objective measurements that affect the overall QoE. These metrics are computed from a combination of transport network layer information, quality features of 3D video signal and coding parameters embedded in compressed streams. The project seeks to investigate No-Reference (NR) methods such that blind 3D quality assessment can be carried out at any point of the delivery chain including the receiving terminal. Such an approach is rather more challenging than Full-Reference (FR) or even Reduced-Reference (RR) methods, where either the original signal or partial information about it is available.

The E-NEXT Network of Excellence targets a key area of Information Society Technologies, namely computer networking. Framework Programme 6 aims to develop the technological basis and the people-skills necessary to deliver the promise of the information revolution – new audio-visual services and products, electronic delivery of business, health, education, entertainment, government, science and so on – and this will fundamentally impact every aspect of life and work. The delivery of all of these e-endeavours depends entirely on computer networks. E-NEXT aims to integrate a critical mass of expertise and to re-structure research practice such that Europe can take a lead in computer networking and act as a world force in this area. The main objectives of this NoE will be: the development of a virtual research centre to integrate the world-class research of the members and to stimulate the exchange of personnel, the education and training of personnel inside and outside the network, the dissemination of research results and in general the spreading of excellence, and the stimulation of innovation by appropriate technology transfer into existing and new companies, both large and small. E-NEXT will achieve these objectives through its management structure consisting of network and country coordination committees, and six workpackages: network coordination, joint research, integration and training, distributed work environment, spreading excellence, and dissemination. E-NEXT is targeted at line 3.1.8 in the First Call for proposals, Networked Audio-Visual Systems and HomePlatforms. This line aims to ‘support the innovation and development of technologies for end-to-end interoperable audio-visual networks, services and applications’. E-NEXT will make a major contribution to these aims, as well as potentially contributing to other areas of IST, for example to Broadband for All, and to Research Networking. More info at the European Commission website here.  

Objective The Agentcity vision is: An ambient proactive environment where heterogeneous autonomous and increasingly intelligent systems representing businesses, services and individuals are able to interact with each other in a peer to peer manner and enable flexible and dynamic composition of services. Knowledge, information and service sharing is effectively available to users and organisations. When new pertinent or innovative services are available they are immediately offered to the appropriate user. Services are automatically discovered and integrated at the right level of interaction. Ontology, security, reputation and trust services in the environment should further enrich the range of businesses and private interactions possible between agent peers. Furthermore, the environment should be open to allow new services and systems to be connected and integrated semantically by coming on-line automatically.Objectives:The primary objectives of this project are:(a) to create a realistic, decentralised open environment which enables high level semantic interoperability between systems to support formation of novel, dynamic value constellations,b) to build sufficient knowledge and understanding of dynamic open environments to enable transition to widespread usage in reliable commercial grade systems.The project addresses dynamic value constellations in Four ways:(1) Designing and deploying an open extensible network environment which can support heterogeneous service building blocks composable into new value added service(2) The integration of business services into the environment to support rich interactions(3) The bringing together agent level communication technologies to provide a unified framework for modelling dynamic application services and(4) Demonstration points to show some of the depth and breadth of the world wide network of agent platforms and services.