Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

It is forecast that the vast majority of Internet connections will be wireless. The EVA project will grasp this opportunity and focus on wireless communication. EVA will tackle challenges related to providing efficient communication in wireless networks and, more generally, in all networks that are not already organized when set up, and consequently need to evolve and spontaneously find a match between application requirements and the environment. These networks can use opportunistic and/or collaborative communication schemes. They can evolve through optimization and self-learning techniques. Every effort will be made to ensure that the results provided by EVA will have the greatest possible impact on standardization. The miniaturization and ubiquitous nature of computing devices has opened the way to the deployment of a new generation of wireless (sensor) networks. These networks will be central to the work in EVA, as EVA will focus on such crucial issues as power conservation, connectivity, determinism1, reliability and latency. Wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments will also be a new key subject, especially for emergency situations (e.g. after a disaster). Industrial process automation and environmental monitoring will be considered in greater depth.