Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contracts with Industry

Real-Time-At-Work

RealTimeAtWork.com is a startup from Inria Lorraine created in December 2007. Bruno Gaujal is a scientific partner and a founding member of the startup. Its main target is to provide software tools for solving real time constraints in embedded systems, particularly for superposition of periodic flows. Such flows are typical in automotive and avionics industries who are the privileged potential users of the technologies developed by http://www.RealTimeAtWork.com .

CILOE with Bull, Compagnie des Signaux, TIMA, CEA-LETI, LIG, Edxact, Infiniscale, Probayes, SCelectronique

The increasingly miniaturization of components and the ever-increasing complexity of electronic circuits for communication systems requires a set of sophisticated tools for design and simulation. These tools in turn often require immense computational resources, sometimes more than several orders of magnitude above the performance of a desktop PC or a workstation. These tools are so compute-intensive that they require supercomputers, clusters and grids. However, these types of computing resources are often not within the reach of PME's (relatively small companies or start-ups) in the semiconductor industry and sometimes even large companies, not only because of the cost of infrastructure, but also because of the lack of adequate methods and technologies for high performance computing.

In association with Minalogic, there are about twenty PME's that develop CAD software, and other companies in the field of embedded systems, the design of electronic circuits, and the simulation process. The most advanced companies utilize high performance computing, and the others will have to do so in 2 or 3 years. All of these companies are confronted with a notable lack of services and facilities for intensive computing, which heavily affect their competitiveness and speed of development.

It is in this context that the partners of this CILOE project propose to design and develop a complete computational infrastructure, including methodologies, software, and security mechanisms. This infrastructure will contribute decisively to the development and visibility of the international PME partners in the project. It will be an essential tool for a sustainable boost in the sector of electronic CAD, embedded software and high-performance simulation and moreover, facilitate growth for all companies in the electronics industry in Alpes region.

ADR Selfnets with Alcatel

Selfnets is an ADR (action de recherche) of the common laboratory between Inria and Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs. Bruno Gaujal is co-leading the action with Vincent Rocca. Selfnets is mainly concerned with self-optimizing wireless networks (Wifi, 3G, LTE). Eight Inria teams are participating in Selfnets. As for MESCAL, we mainly work on recent mobile equipment (e.g. using the norm IEEE 802.21) can freely switch between different technologies (vertical handover). This allows for some flexibility in resource assignment and, consequently, increases the potential throughput allocated to each user. We develop and analyze fully distributed algorithms based on evolutionary games that exploit the benefits of vertical handover by finding fair and efficient user-network association schemes.

A patent on a simplified version of our algorithm has been taken by the common lab in 2010.

In 2011, a new patent has been filled on new algorithms that are robust to noise on measurements as well as to several revision scenarios (mobiles change their connections to base stations simultaneously or asynchronously).