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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Labs

Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs

REALMS
  • Title: Real-Time Real-World Monitoring Systems

  • International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

    • University of California Berkeley (United States) - Civil and Environmental Engineering - Steven Glaser

    • University of Michigan (United States) - Civil and Environmental Engineering - Branko Kerkez

  • Start year: 2015

  • See also: http://glaser.berkeley.edu et http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bkerkez/

  • The Internet of Things revolution prompted the development of new products and standards; The IEEE802.15.4e (2012) standard introduced the Time Synchronized Channel Hoping (TSCH) which can provide end-to-end reliability of 99.999 % and an energy autonomy of many years. This exceptional performance prompted the IETF to create the 6TISCH working group to standardize the integration of TSCH networks in the Internet. While the first experimental data have highlighted the great robustness of these networks, there is no data of a real network, accessible in real time, on a large scale and over a long period. Such data is needed to better model network performance and produce better products and standards. Teams of Professors Glaser and Kerkez are successfully deploying such networks to study mountain hydrology, monitor water quality and manage rainwater in urban environments. A model is missing to assist in the deployment and operation of these networks, as well as to monitor an operational network.

DIVERSITY
  • Title: Measuring and Exploiting Diversity in Low-Power Wireless Networks

  • International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

    • University of Southern California (United States) - Autonomous Networks Research Group (ANRG) - Bhaskar Krishnamachari

  • Start year: 2016

  • The goal of the DIVERSITY associate team is to develop the networking technology for tomorrow's Smart Factory. The two teams comes with a perfectly complementary background on standardization and experimentation (Inria-EVA) and scheduling techniques (USC-ANRG). The key topic addressed by the joint team will be networking solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), with a particular focus on reliability and determinism.

Inria International Partners

Declared Inria International Partners

Inria-EVA has a long-standing Memorandum of Understanding with the OpenMote company (http://www.openmote.com/), which runs until 2020. OpenMote emerged as a spin-off of the OpenWSN project, co-lead by Thomas Watteyne and Prof. Xavier Vilajosana, Professor at the Open University of Catalonia and Chief Technical Officer at OpenMote.

The collaboration has been ongoing since 2012 and at the time of writing has resulted in:

  • Joint academic publications, including 7 journal articles, 1 letter, 1 book chapter, 5 conference papers, 2 tutorials and invited talks.

  • Joint standardization activities, in particular in the IETF 6TiSCH working group, co-chaired by Thomas Watteyne and for which Prof. Xavier Vilajosana is a key contributor. This activity has resulted in the joint participation in 12 IETF face-to-face meetings, joint participation in over 100 audioconferences, co-authorship of 3 Internet-Drafts and joint organization of 2 interop events.

  • Joint software development, as both institutions closely collaborate in the maintenance, development, promotion and research along the OpenWSN project, including the development of the protocol stack, the integration of novel hardware technologies, the support to the community and the participation in standardization activities and interoperability events.

This MOU is NOT a commitment of funds by any part.

Informal International Partners

The Inria-EVA collaborates extensively with Prof. Pister's group at UC Berkeley on the OpenWSN and Smart Dust projects. This activity translated into several members of the Pister team visiting Inria-EVA and vice-versa in 2017.

Participation in Other International Programs

International Initiatives
  • PEACH

  • Title: PrEcision Agriculture through Climate researcH

  • International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

    • Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) - Diego Dujovne

    • Universidad Tecnológica de Mendoza (Argentina) - Gustavo Mercado

  • Duration: 2016 - 2017

  • In 2013, 85% of the peach production in the Mendoza region (Argentina) was lost because of frost. Because less fruit was produced in the region, 600.000 less work days were needed to process the harvest between November 2013 and March 2014, a reduction in work force of 10.600 people. Across the Mendoza region, frost has caused a loss of revenue of 950 million Argentine pesos - roughly 100 million USD - in the peach business alone. A frost event happens when the temperature is so low that the crops cannot recover their tissue or internal structure from the effects of water freezing inside or outside the plant. For the peach production, a critical period is when the trees are in bloom and fruit set (Aug./Sept. in Mendoza), during which the temperature needs to be kept above -3 C. Even a few hours below that temperature causes flowers to fall, preventing fruits to grow. Because of the huge economic impact, countermeasures exist and are used extensively. Today, virtually all industrial peach orchards are equipped with a small number of meteorological stations which monitor temperature and humidity. If the temperature drops dangerously low, the most effective countermeasures is to install a number of furnaces in the orchard (typically coal-fueled) and fly helicopters above the orchard to distribute the heat and avoid cold spots. This countermeasure is effective, but suffers from false negatives (the helicopters are called in, but there is no frost event) and false positives (the meteorological stations don't pick up a frost event happening in some part of the orchard). What is missing is a dense real-time monitoring solution deployed in the orchard, and feeding a frost prediction model. For this, having a couple of meteorological stations doesn't provide the measurement density needed. Frost events are micro-climatic: cold and hot air have a different density, wind blows irregularly between the trees, so different parts of an orchard are affected very differently by frost. What is needed are a large number of sensing points (humidity, temperature, wind speed), at different elevations, throughout the orchard. Low-power wireless mesh networking technology has evolved significantly over recent years. With this technology, a node is the size of a deck of cards, is self-contained and battery-operated. When switched on, nodes form a multi-hop low-power wireless network, automatically. Off-the-shelf commercial solutions are available today which offer >99.999% end-to-end data reliability and a decade of battery lifetime. Rather than being installed at a fixed location, these nodes can be hung directly in the trees. A network is deployed in an orchard in a matter of hours, and if needed, sensing points can be moved to improve the accuracy of the prediction model in minutes. And this solution is cheap, too: for the price one meteorological station, one can build 10 low-power wireless mesh sensing nodes. We use machine learning and pattern recognition to build an micro-climate predictive model by continuously analyzing the gathered sensor data in real time. This model generates early frost warnings. If successful, the solution can be extended to other crops, and other regions. The goal of this project is to dramatically increase the predictability of frost events in peach orchards by using dense monitoring using low-power wireless mesh networking technology. The project is designed to be completed in 24-month, and involves: (1) building a dense sensing solution based on off-the-shelf networking and sensing products, (2) developing accurate frost prediction models based on the sensing data gathered, (3) conducting real-world deployments on peach orchards in the Mendoza region. This project brings together world experts in agronomic and networking fields in a symbiotic manner. Perfectly in line with the philosophy of STIC-AmSud, the teams are already conducting cutting-edge research in their respective fields; the funding we are applying for would enable the teams to collaborate together in a cross-disciplinary manner.