Project CIER

Abstract

In remote parts of Europe and Africa, the lack of energy supply, of wired infrastructure, of trained personnel and the limitation in OPEX and CAPEX impose stringent requirements on the network building blocks that support the communication infrastructure. Consequently, in this promising but untapped market, the CIER project aims at designing and implementing energy-efficient, robust, reliable and affordable wide heterogeneous wireless mesh networks to connect geographically very large areas in a challenged environment.
In terms of technical focus, the CIER project develops novel Adaptive Modulation and Coding and smart beamforming antennas to adapt radio transmission to the availability of energy. Furthermore, the development of a network monitoring system and robust message forwarding mechanisms based on self-configuration/self-management techniques deployed in a large multi-radio meshed converged infrastructure cope with the lack of human resources and wired infrastructure. Finally, the design of a cross-layer architecture optimizes power consumption and content delivery.
As a part of the CIER project, field trials are used as a proof-of-concept for the developed system. These field trials along with simulations and experiments are further used to validate and evaluate the developed converged infrastructure, assessing the achievable cost reductions and performance enhancements.