Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

This is the last activity report of the Inria UrbaNet team, which officially ended in December 2016. Team UrbaNet's overall objectives were to study and characterize the architectures of urban capillary wireless networks and to propose mechanisms and protocols that are designed for the specific settings of the urban environment. This required taking into account constraints on the node deployment, heterogeneous and dynamic wireless connectivity, and requirements yielded by the usage of the city and the societal trends. Our methodology consisted in combining formal verification and combinatorial optimization methods with simulation based and analytical performance assessments to guide the development of relevant mechanisms. We entered this experience in 2012, with a group of researchers with a background on generic multi-hop wireless networks and we end it now, after four great years, in which we initiated collaborations with experts in transportation, air pollution, urbanism, economics or robotics. These collaborations brought us closer to the real problem of networking in an urban environment and challenged our view of wireless multi-hop networks. We are now studying hybrid (short and long range communications) architectures, new communication technologies (RFID, VLC), and new networking paradigms (energy harvesting). We are focusing on the dense deployment of nodes and functionalities, and the challenges this brings. And, finally, we try to extract as much information as possible from real massive data, obtained from our collaborators or collected by us. If you are curious about how will this go, follow us as team Agora from January 2017.