Second IAC workshop

The second industry meeting of the SAMURAI project was held on 26 January 2016. With 25 participants, the interests in the project remains large!

The agenda consisted of the following topics:

12:00-13:00         Sandwich lunch
13:00-13:30         Welcome and introduction (Ingrid Moerman & Eli De Poorter, IBCN – UGent)
13:30-14:00         Closing the loop in unlicensed spectrum: Challenging real-time sensor networks (Sofie Pollin, TELEMIC – KULeuven)
Wireless sensor networks are used in a wide variety of applications in a best effort way. This is possible as for most applications reliability is not critical, and failures only cause a slight inconvenience to the user. Next generation wireless systems, researched under the 5G agenda, will be required to address the need for low latency and highly reliable (up to 5 nines) machine to machine communications. This demo will show a practical implementation of such a system built using Software Defined Radio technologies. The radio link will be used to balance a robot on two wheels, which is impossible when a lot of packets are lost and delayed. The reliable protocol can be challenged interactively by a human opponent. Who knows how to beat the reliable protocol and make the robot fall?
14:00-14:30         Adapting to dynamic wireless environments through MAC protocol switching (Eli De Poorter, IBCN – UGent)
Since the MAC protocol has a crucial influence on application layer performance metrics such as reliability, throughput and delays, nowadays wireless devices need to be adaptive even at MAC layer to cope with changing network conditions (density, interference, ...), changing application requirements or changing technologies. However, current MAC protocols can not easily be changed after deployment. This demo presents TAISC, an architecture designed to simplify the design and installation and swapping of MAC protocols on embedded devices. Similar to smartphone app stores, TAISC is designed to allow downloading of MAC protocols and switch between different MAC protocols at run-time, allowing more flexibility and better wireless performance.
14:30-14:45         Coffee break
14:45-15:15         Designing custom MAC protocols on linux systems (Wim Torfs, MOSAIC - Universiteit Antwerpen)
The composition, performance and usage of an OS such as Linux on a full blown pc architecture is entirely different from a sensor device with its own specific OS. In this presentation we show that a MAC framework, which was initially designed for sensor networks, can also be ported towards a Linux system. We demonstrate that our framework can be embedded in the ath9k driver and as such determines the transmission and reception behavior of the Wi-Fi card. The demo will show that by means of the MAC framework, a certain delay can be introduced, thereby exposing some control on the transmission times.
15:15-15:45         Full duplex communication and collision detection enabling low delay high reliable communication (Sofie Pollin, TELEMIC – KULeuven)
We demonstrate a real-time RF self-interference cancellation scheme for in-band full duplex using an electrical balance duplexer. The balance network in the duplexer has four 8-bit tunable capacitor banks, creating a four dimensional optimization space with over 4 billion settings. We present a particle swarm optimizer that is able to find a close to optimal solution within 1 ms. The goal of this demo is to show a self-interference cancellation scheme for very dynamic environments. More specifically our demo is able to mitigate instantaneous changes in the antenna impedance in order to keep the self-interference below the threshold. Using the demonstrated real-time self-interference cancellation, we will implement a full duplex radio and MAC protocol on top of the CLAWS SDR framework. Emphasis will first be on full duplex collision and interference detection, achieving very effective wireless communication in the most challenged environments.
15:45-16:15         Overview of future SAMURAI research (All SAMURAI partners)
16:15-16:30         Industry feedback
16:30-18:00         Social networking event
 
All presentations are available for the SAMURAI board of industry (IAC) members. If you would like to join the IAC, please contact us.