Section: Application Domains

Military, Energy and Aerospace

Through the HIPERCOM project, EVA has developed cutting-edge expertise in using wireless networks for military, energy and aerospace applications. Wireless networks are a key enabling technology in the application domains, as they allow physical processes to be instrumented (e.g. the structural health of an airplane) at a granularity not achievable by its wired counterpart. Using wireless technology in these domains does however raise many technical challenges, including end-to-end latency, energy-efficiency, reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Mobility is often an additional constraint in energy and military applications. Achieving scalability is of paramount importance for tactical military networks, and, albeit to a lesser degree, for power plants. EVA will work in this domain.

Smart cities share the constraint of mobility (both pedestrian and vehicular) with tactical military networks. Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) will play an important role in the development of smarter cities.

The coexistence of different networks operating in the same radio spectrum can cause interference that should be avoided. Cognitive radio provides secondary users with the frequency channels that are temporarily unused (or unassigned) by primary users. Such opportunistic behavior can also be applied to urban wireless sensor networks. Smart cities raise the problem of transmitting, gathering, processing and storing big data. Another issue is to provide the right information at the place where it is most needed.