Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

• Title: Agrinet

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher): Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Riaan Wolhuter

• Type: LIRIMA Associate team

• Duration: 2017-2020

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/agrinet/

• The current drought and limited water resources in many parts of Southern Africa and beyond, already have a significant impact on agriculture and hence, food production. Sustainable food security depends upon proper plant and crop management respectful of soils and natural re- sources, such as water. This includes very important South African farming areas, such as the Western Cape and Northern Cape. In France, agriculture is also hugely important. Not just nationally, but also in Europe. The system proposed can be applied to a variety of crops. The economic- and social consequences are profound and any contribution towards more efficient farming within increasingly onerous natural constraints, should be a priority. To address these constraints, we propose to develop a flexible, rapidly deployable, biological/agricultural data acquisition platform and associated machine learning algorithms to create advanced agricultural monitoring and management techniques, to improve crop management and use of natural resources. The project also addresses an industry with very high socioeconomic impact.

  Publications issued from that project in 2019 are: [12], [16].

• Université Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria (UNIC) (Italy): The objective of this collaboration is the design of an innovative architecture that enables autonomic and decentralized fruition of the services offered by the network of smart objects in many heterogeneous and dynamic environments, such that is independent of the network topology, in a reliable and flexible way. The result is an 'ecosystem' of self-organized and self-sustained objects, capable of making data and services available to the users wherever and whenever required, thus supporting the fruition of an 'augmented' reality thanks to a new environmental and social awareness.

• Anna-Maria Vegni from Roma Tre University, Italy: The purpose of this collaboration is to study alternative communication paradigms and investigate their limitations and different effects on performances. In this framework, joint publications have been obtained, among them in 2019 [23], [33], [15], [24], [32].

• CroMo

• Title: Crowd data in the mobile cloud

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) - GTA Laboratory - Luis Henrique Costa

• Duration: 2015 - 2019

• Start year: 2015

• CroMo's main goal is to investigate alternatives to efficiently offload multiple data collected from mobile users to the cloud. To achieve this goal, CroMo will focus on three complementary objectives:

  • Objective 1 (Data acquisition): In a wireless environment, data can be sourced at a multitude of wireless devices. Hence, the first objective of this project is to identify the most relevant information from all the data available by using local criteria. The notion of local can be concerned with a single wireless device or a set of nearby wireless devices. The goal is to only send relevant data to the cloud or to assign a higher priority to it.

  • Objective 2 (Data transmission): The large-scale sensing system forces massive transmission to the cloud. Hence, transmitting the data in a reliable and timely fashion is the purpose of this second objective.

  • Objective 3 (Data computation): Mobile clouds must be available for wireless users to receive and process data. Hence, the cloud infrastructure must be efficient enough to process data from users in a efficient fashion. The third objective of this project is to evaluate cloud availability and to propose performance improvements for data computation. Such improvements are concerned with cloud infrastructure adaptation according to users' demands.

  In this context, our project is original and ambitious. Indeed, compared to other studies in wireless networking, our project is focused on a global approach from raw data acquisition to information creation at the mobile cloud infrastructure.