The A-BAM (Application for Broadband Availability Mapping) project will develop a feasibility study for a mobile application that aggregates the needs of all the key stakeholders in the development of broadband connectivity, in one single place, throughout Europe: Local/Regional/National Administrations, End-Users and ISPs (Internet Service Providers). It will assist users such as households or businesses to ascertain the broadband options and services that are available in any particular area, allowing where applicable to select other ISPs offering higher speed broadband services at their location through a Europe-wide switching service. This will benefit ISPs by providing an additional marketing channel to help them engage with, and attract, new customers. Additionally, it will enable households and SMEs to identify whether any government or privately funded broadband promotion schemes are already available and what these are, or identify any infrastructure schemes that are planned in the area. The application will aggregate and provide this data for local and regional governments in order to facilitate the tailoring as well as adoption of these schemes aimed at supporting Europe to meet the objectives set forth in the EC Digital Agenda: universal availability of Broadband speeds of at least 30 Mb/s throughout Europe, with 50% having speeds above 100 Mb/s.

The SCREEN project brings the concept of cognitive radio to Space and exploits the benefits that this technology has already shown in the terrestrial domain. The project will look into analysing, developing, implementing and testing cognitive radio algorithms. The ground breaking element in SCREEN is however the implementation and testing. Even though some of the underlying technologies for the individual stages are not novel, the incorporation of all stages in a radio transceiver has never been done to the full extent of a cognitive, and not adaptive, system. The key enabling technology for cognitive radio is Software-Defined Radio (SDR), which provides the required flexibility to reconfigure the radio parameters autonomously and without any changes in the transceiver hardware. The Consortium will make use of proprietary SDR technology and use it for the implementation and testing. In fact, the project approach is to make use of terrestrial research results in cognitive radio at all levels (technological, market and regulatory) and capitalise the previous work done in different projects, avoiding unnecessary duplication of efforts. The target spectrum band for this project is S-band, which is underexplored and has a strong potential for future niche applications both in satcom and in ISLs for multi-satellite missions. It also brings advantages regarding regulatory concerns. This project clearly fits the topic, not only because its main goal is to evolve an innovative technology up to TRL4/5, but also because cognitive radio is a key enabling technology for the areas identified by the topic. This technology will lead to a new generation of satcom payloads and also have massive impact on ISLs and downlink subsystems. It also brings a terrestrial technology to space, together with new players, which has the possibility to dramatically improve the performance, efficiency and versatility of space communications.

With the emerging automated tasks in vehicle domain, the development of in-vehicle communications is increasingly important and subjected to new applications. Although both wired and wireless communications have been largely used for supporting diverse applications, most of in-vehicle applications with mission-critical nature, such as brake and engine controls, still prefer dedicated wired networks for reliable and secure transmission. One of the key challenges for data wiring is to facilitate the interconnectivity of increasing devices, e.g., sensors and electronic control units (ECU), effectively creating an in-vehicle network with low response latency, improved reliability and less complexity. The space requirement, weight, and installation costs for these wires can become significant, especially in future vehicles, which are highly sophisticated electronic systems. Given that vehicle components, sensors and ECUs are already connected to power wires, we apply vehicle power lines, which have recently been utilized for in-vehicle communications at the physical layer, to in-vehicle networks in this proposal. Taking mass air flow sensor as an example, it has one power wire and two signal wires, it will be efficient to use power line communications to replace the current signal wires, so 66% of wiring can be reduced. The advancement of vehicular power line communications (VPLC) can provide a very low complexity and free platform for in-vehicle networks, which is ideal for the increasing demand of applications in particular with future vehicles. However, the emerging VPLC is constrained by lack of protocol support, which pose significant challenges to deploy it in practise and ensure mission-critical communications. The following example illustrates the motivation of this proposal. An example for the motivation: A future vehicle is equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) which can be connected with multiple sensors and ECUs to provide safety monitoring and control. An important demand of this scenario is that the systems, viewed as sources, should have stable connections with all ECUs, or network destinations. And it is also important that such in-vehicle networks must guarantee ultra-low latency for emerging control services since any seconds of delay may cause fatal accident. Therefore, an effective protocol design is crucial for VPLC to support future applications with mission-critical and high-bandwidth demands. The aim of the project is to improve the reliability of the network and guarantee stringent mission-critical requirements of in-vehicle applications in vehicular power line communications. We will partner with automotive specialists and construct the project to develop innovative and intelligent in-vehicle communication protocols. The solution this proposal is seeking is two fold. One is to pursue new design of intelligent access and congestion control solutions by fully exploring the practical and theoretical analysis, dynamic nature of channels/traffic patterns and self-learning techniques, which provides the theoretic aspect of the proposal. Then, the second step is from the practical aspect, where the proposed power line method shall be able to coexist and cooperate with existing state-of-the-art solutions, and its performance will be validated by practical in-vehicle traffic data. Obviously the two are inseparable not just because the ultimate goal of reliable communication for in-vehicle networks is only possible with the accomplishment of the both two parts, but also because the interaction between the two parts is the key for effective system design.

The aim of SANSA project is to boost the performance of mobile wireless backhaul networks in terms of capacity and resilience while assuring an efficient use of the spectrum. Recently, a global mobile traffic increase of 11-fold between 2013 and 2018 was predicted, so novel solutions are required to avoid backhaul becoming the bottle neck of future mobile networks. The solution envisaged in SANSA is a spectrum efficient self-reconfigurable hybrid terrestrial-satellite backhaul network based on three key principles: (i) a seamless integration of the satellite segment into terrestrial backhaul networks; (ii) a terrestrial wireless network capable of reconfiguring its topology according to traffic demands; (iii) a shared spectrum between satellite and terrestrial segments. This combination will result in a flexible solution capable of efficiently routing the mobile traffic in terms of capacity and energy efficiency, while providing resilience against link failures or congestion and easy deployment in rural areas. Therefore, we will develop novel smart antennas, dynamic radio resource management and data-based shared access techniques for enabling the spectrum sharing among both segments, as well as efficient management and routing solutions for the hybrid network. These studies will yield to the implementation and demonstration of the two key components proof of concepts: (i) low-cost smart antennas (to be deployed in terrestrial nodes) with beam and null-steering capabilities for interference mitigation between satellite and terrestrial transceivers and network topology reconfiguration; (ii) hybrid network manager capable of controlling the resources of the hybrid network. Besides indirectly allowing the traffic increase to the mobile users, the SANSA project will set the path for a win-win collaboration between satellite and terrestrial operators that will strengthen both European sectors and also their related industries such as equipment manufacturers.