Project full title: Mechanisms for Optimization of hybrid ad-hoc and satellite NETworks
European Union FP7 programme
FP7-ICT – ICT-2009.1.1 – The Network of the Future
Grant agreement no.: 247176
Website
http://monet.tekever.com/
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/247176/
Coordinator: TEKEVER Corporation (PT)
Consortium: Tekever (PT), CRAT (IT), University of Surrey (UK), ISDEFE (ES), EADS Astrium (FR), Administration of the Republic of Slovenia for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief (SL)
Duration: 30 months
Starting Date: January 2010
Expected Ending: June 2012
CRAT Key Persons
Scientific co-coordinators: Prof. Francesco Delli Priscoli, Dr. Antonio Pietrabissa
Project Description: The potential of Mobile wireless Adhoc Networks (MANET) is significantly high. The application of MANET to areas such as emergency rescue, environmental observation, scientific investigations, commercial environments, home and enterprise networking, educational applications, entertainment, military operations and location-aware services holds great promises. The automatic adaptation of the network topology to the field context provided by MANET, make these a great asset in providing local connectivity. However, these applications often happen in infrastructure-less or remote regions where remote connectivity to the outside world has to be provided by some other means.
Satellite is one of the solutions to provide this remote connectivity and sometimes the only solution for the MANET to communicate with other parts of the world. Current expectations dictate that satellite will be seen not only as a component of an alternative routing path but also as part of a unique (really integrated) system. Examples of the benefits of satellite include IP via satellite in regions with no access to terrestrial DSL, new architectures for near-video on demand, satellite networks integrated with WiFi, WiMAX, LTE or TETRA, or satellite networks backhauling collectively mobile networks in ships, trains, or airplanes.
The concept of a hybrid MANET-Satellite network is therefore a natural evolution of considering the problem of providing local and remote connectivity in a highly mobile, dynamic and often remote environment. This combination raises, nonetheless, significant challenges in terms of optimising network resources, link availability, providing Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) (the subjective measure of a customer’s experiences with a service supplier) and minimizing costs and energy.
Issues such as the re-organisation of MANET to connect to satellite access points, re-organisation of the satellite access points, selection of which satellite access points to use, the use of satellite as a relay between two MANET, the adjustment of routing in accordance with the current network situation and the exchange of cross layer information to improve resource management are some of the challenges which we feel require investigation. MONET will study these challenges, propose and develop solutions for the optimization of a hybrid MANET-Satellite network, implement a prototype of the most promising solutions and test them in the field, in near real-life conditions.
CRAT Contributions
– Definition of MONET architecture
– Definition of process, data formats and control aspects of software components
– Resources management optimization (network layer, MAC layer or Cross-layer) both for the satellite segment and for the whole system, by means of admission control and bandwidth on demand protocols
– Routing protocol and network efficiency optimization (network layer, MAC layer or cross-layer) both for the MANET and for the whole system, by means of load balancing protocols, energy-saving criteria, fault-tolerant mechanisms
– Software development for the MONET demonstrator
– Leader of dissemination and exploitation work package