CorteXlab

Cognitive Radio is the Future

In the future internet of things, wireless technologies will represent a large part of the market in weak competition with power line or infrared communications. Up to now, standards have been developed with a bottom-up approach and the radio spectrum sharing policies are mostly static. Since billions of objects are expected to use wireless links, the present way the wireless medium is shared has to be revisited. For such, radio systems, algorithms and protocols have to be deeply transformed. The most promising approach stems from the cognitive radio paradigm, which relies on three complementary mandatory properties: radio systems real-time reconfigurability, wireless environment awareness behavior, and self-organization capability. The first item is referred to as software defined radio (SDR), the second as cognitive radio (CR) and the third as self-optimization networks (SON).

CorteXlab

A valuable platform able to test realistic future scenarios, should offer the possibility to evaluate simultaneously these three items to support the actual theoretical developments from an experimental point of view. Unfortunately, a platform that contemplates all of these topics at the same time does not currently exist. CorteXlab aims to fill in this gap. The CorteXlab testbed will be hosted at INSA-Lyon in France, benefiting from the Senslab (now FIT/IoT-lab) experience and from the 5 years experience on developing a MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) high data rate reconfigurable platform. CorteXlab will use the network architecture developed in IoT-lab and will integrate SDR nodes to offer a remotely accessible development platform for distributed Cognitive Radio (CR). Reconfigurability, compatibility, coexistence and even cooperation between SDR nodes will be evaluable. A large set of heterogeneous SDR nodes (MIMO nodes, SISO nodes and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes) together with classical sensor nodes will permit a full experimental evaluation.

Cognitive Radio at the Reach of everyone

CorteXlab will allow remote users to test their own algorithms on the existing nodes, but the architecture will be also opened to industry third party to deploy their own front-end (RF or UWB) or baseband systems to test and validate their developments. A clear expected result is offering a remote access to all equipments in a comprehensive way, such that many scenarios can be evaluated by remote users. A second target is to create a “network of SDR” development community including people from digital communications, networking and embedded systems, to provide a complete set of functionalities and also enroll interesting industrial partners to include in the platform new SDR or front end components.

Contact

Tanguy Risset


Sense City

Sense-City is an EquipEx platform lead by Université Paris-Est. It provides a set of equipment for prototyping and evaluating the performances of micro and nanosensor systems for sustainable cities. Sense-City is a « climatic mini-city », a 400m² large, mobile and reconfigurable hall, able to host realistic urban experimentations in controlled environmental and climatic environment. The main urban features are available such as buildings, infrastructures, urban furniture, distribution networks, and soils. The Urbanet team is involved in several experiments, including « smart-road » sensor networks for low-cost vehicle detection, and atmospheric pollution sensor deployments and self-calibration.

Contact

Hervé Rivano


Golo – a lightweight dynamic language for the JVM

Golo is a dynamically typed language for the JVM originally developed as part of the research activities of the Dynamid research team. Golo is now a mature Eclipse Technology Project with a larger contributors community comprising hobbyists, language tinkerers and researchers. Golo has been designed around a small invokedynamic-based runtime which makes it a great choice for experimenting with alternative language and runtime designs, as illustrated in the ConGolo and HardenedGolo experiments at the CITI Lab.

Contact

Julien Ponge


Microscopic Vehicular Mobility Trace of Europarc Roundabout, Creteil, France

The vehicular mobility dataset is mainly based on the real data collected by the General Departmental Council of Val de Marne (94) in France. The General Departmental Council of Val de Marne is a regional agency in charge – amongst other activities – of the transportation systems.

Different simulations tools and models are brought together to characterize and synthesize this trace:

  • the street layout of Creteil roundabout area is obtained from the OpenStreetMap database,
  • the traffic demand information on the traffic flow is derived from car counting and camera video analysis,
  • the traffic assignment of the vehicular flows is performed by Gawron’s dynamic user assignment algorithm, included in the SUMO – Simulation of Urban MObility – simulator.
  • the traffic light mechanism is derived from sequence adaptation manually documented in the regional transportation system.

The resulting synthetic trace includes a roundabout with 6 entrances/exits, 2 or 3-lanes roads, 1 bus road, 4 changing-lane spots, 15 traffic lights. It comprises around 10000 trips, over rush hour periods of two hours in the morning (7AM-9AM) and two hours in the evening (5PM-7PM).

Contact

Frédéric Le Mouël


NVRAM for Transiently-Powered Systems

Non Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM) is an umbrella term covering several upcoming memory technologies like with groundbreaking properties. These include ferroelectric memory (FRAM), magnetoresistive memory (MRAM), phase-change memory (PCM), and the memristor. Non-volatility means that data stays intact when power is lost. Random access means that each byte can be read or written directly by the CPU.
These two properties together make the classical RAM+Flash architecture obsolete, and enable the design of tiny embedded systems running on intermittent power. This is very attractive in the context of energy-constrained scenarios, for instance systems harvesting their power from the environment. But working with NVRAM also poses novel challenges in terms of software programming. For instance, application state consistency must be guaranteed accross reboots, even though the system includes both NVRAM and volatile elements (e.g. CPU, hardware periperals).
In this context, we are developing and studying novel operating system mechanisms for NVRAM-based embedded systems.

Contact

Guillaume Salagnac

Kevin Marquet


Sense In The City

Sense in the city is a lightweight experimentation platform for wireless sensor networks in development. The main objective of this platform is to be easily transferable and deployable on the field. It allows a simplified deployment of the code running on the sensors and the collection of logs generated by the instrumentation of the code on a centralized database. In the early stage of the platform, the sensors are powered by small PCs, e.g. Raspberry Pis, but we are investigating the integration of energy harvesting capabilities such as solar panels.

Contact

Khaled Boussetta


Robots + IoT (ROBIOT)

Service robotics is an application domain currently emerging rapidly. We are involved in developing observation and surveillance systems, by using ground robots (Turtlebot2 robots) or aerial ones (Parrot Bibop 1 drones).

Contact

Olivier Simonin


Jumplyn – A Social Project Network

Jumplyn is a student project management and development platform. It offers a service based on three features: the ongoing management of the project, the recommendation of relevant ressources, the enhancement of the project’s activity. As any intermediation platform, it connects directly with its main users, i.e. students, and puts them in relation to relevant information and people.

Contact

Stéphane Frénot


Vehicular Mobility Trace of the City of Cologne, Germany

The vehicular mobility dataset is mainly based on the data made available by the TAPASCologne project. TAPASCologne is an initiative by the Institute of Transportation Systems at the German Aerospace Center (ITS-DLR), aimed at reproducing, with the highest level of realism possible, car traffic in the greater urban area of the city of Cologne, in Germany.

To that end, different state-of-art data sources and simulation tools are brought together, so to cover all of the specific aspects required for a proper characterization of vehicular traffic:

  • The street layout of the Cologne urban area is obtained from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database;
  • The microscopic mobility of vehicles is simulated with the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) software;
  • The traffic demand information on the macroscopic traffic flows across the Cologne urban area (i.e., the O/D matrix) is derived through the Travel and Activity PAtterns Simulation (TAPAS) methodology;
  • The traffic assignment of the vehicular flows described by the TAPASCologne O/D matrix over the road topology is performed by means of Gawron’s dynamic user assignment algorithm.

The resulting synthetic trace of the car traffic in a the city of Cologne covers a region of 400 square kilometers for a period of 24 hours, comprising more than 700.000 individual car trips.

Contact

Marco Fiore


An Event-Driven Simulator for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNET)

WSNet is an event-driven simulator for wireless networks. Its main features:

  • Node simulation: the simulated nodes are built as an arbitrary assembly of blocks which represent either a hardware component, a software component or a behavior/resource of the node.
  • Environment simulation: WSNet offers the opportunity to simulate physical phenomena (e.g. fire) and physical measures (e.g. temperature, humidity). These values can be read by the nodes, evolve in time, and the physical phenomena can impact the nodes, such as destroying them.
  • Radio medium simulation: WSNet has been designed to offer a wide range of radio medium modeling, from a basic ideal physical layer with no interference, no path-loss and a fix radio range to a complex and precise one with a Friis propagation formula, Rayleigh fading, multiple frequencies and complex correlation properties between frequencies, bpsk modulation, complex antenna radiation patterns, etc.
  • Extensibility: Node, environment, and radio medium blocks are developed in independent dynamic libraries. In consequence, the addition of new models does not require to modify the core of WSNet and can be done easily.

Contact

Hervé Rivano