Section: Scientific Foundations

Capillary networks

The digital cities that evolve today need a thin and dense digitalization of their citizens and infrastructures' activities. There is hence a need for a new networking paradigm capable of providing enough capacity and quality of service. From the user point of view, there is only one network to access to data and applications, but from the point of view of operators, engineers, there are several access networks: wireless sensor networks to measure the physical world, the cellular networks (including 3G/4G) to handle mobility, mesh networks to support new applications and services.

We propose to aggregate all these networks in the concept of capillary network. A capillary network is, for the user or end device, a link to Internet, whatever the link is. For engineers and researchers, a capillary network represents all the different possible paths we have from the user terminal to the access network. Providing the support for a digital city and for a digital society requires to focus on Capillary Networking issues. These issues include classical challenges related to sensor, mesh, or user-centric networks (such as cellular or vehicular networks), but also present important components generated by the urban environment.