Projects

The FEDERICA project will create a European wide “technology agnostic” infrastructure made of Gigabit circuits, transmission equipment and computing nodes capable of virtualization to host experimental activities on new Internet architectures and protocols. The FEDERICA network is based on the Research & Education multi-gigabit networks footprint. Circuits are terminated in Points of Presence (PoPs) of NRENs and GÉANT2, hosting FEDERICA nodes capable of virtualising hosts e.g. open source routers and end nodes. Virtual slices of FEDERICA’s infrastructure may be allocated to network researchers for testing even with disruptive experiments within a large production substrate. The researchers will have full control on the allocated virtual nodes and network slice and access network monitoring information. Internal project research is focused on understanding and producing initial solutions for monitoring, management and control of parallel virtual networks.

The main objective ofthe HDVIPER project is to design an open and scalable high-definition videoconferencing platform over IP. This platform is based on a new application called Snake which will be integrated in a PC and in a set-top·box environment (pre-commercial prototype). As far as multiconference is concerned, the architecture ofthe Snake application permits the inclusion ofa module gathering the different flows from audio and video, in a way similarto classical MCU (Multipoint Control Unit), but with the difficulty (unsolved before HDVIPER in commercial and pre-commercial solutions) to support qualities greater than 10 Mbps. The benefits of the projects affects to the business world and the small and medium companies, since they will be able to enjoy savings regarding travel costs and long-term expenses, with an effective utilization 0f IT quality technologies such as the high-definition videoconference. Furthermore, the public institutions and the residential users will have a better satisfaction and reliability impression on the telecommunications services, and, finally, the project will also represent a great deal of benefits for the operating and industrial companies which are in charge of introducing the product to the market.

With the coming of new network technologies, their integration causes the appearance of new challenges to solve. When a new network comes to the arena, sooner or later the provision of the services is demanded, as the rest of the networks, and, generalizing, its integration with the existing networks. From the point of view of the user, the provided service, with its particularities, must be independent of the underlying network technologies. Among these peculiarities, we find the end-to-end quality of service (QoS). One of last examples coming to the plethora of communication networks is the ad-hoc networks. By themselves, the ad-hoc networks are aimed by numerous efforts in the field of the MAC and network level research protocols, including routing and the provision of the quality of service. This project approaches the investigation of the ad-hoc networks from a global point of view, where the management of the quality of service and its provision for services in real time raise numerous challenges to solve and its integration with existing and real networks configure an exciting research scenario in which a lot of research groups have invested their efforts.

El projecte SILVIA té com a objectiu posar en valor la xarxa demostradora actualment coordinada per i2CAT i desplegada dins el marc dels projectes DREAMS (CIDEM, PROFIT) i PAIS (Inforegió), per convertir-la en una plataforma de validació tecnològica oberta que ofereixi serveis avançats al sector TIC Català, on validar nous dispositius i serveis de telecomunicacions de manera transparent, des del nivell físic fins al nivell d’aplicació.

The goal of VISION project is the achievement of a qualitative leap in the audio-visual digital communications, so that people who are separated by long distances can perceive the sensation of physically being in the same place. Therefore, in order to carry out it, research is made on the technologies which enable the generation of knowledge needed for the development of new high-quality advanced communication systems and realism for the interconnection of remote "places" or "environments" through the communication networks.

The main objective of i3media is to generate a framework for the representation and manipulation of intelligent digital contents and for the development of technologies which enable a higher automatization of the audio-visual production. In particular, the increase with respect to the state of the art will involve the automatic association of the intelligence and auto-adaptation functions with the content itself, independently of the underlying communication networks.

The main objective ofthis project is the design and the implementation of a complete tele-immersive system for different scenarios. The developed application has been oriented to support three different services: the CAD/CAE design in the automobile industry, bio-engineering and the remote handling of instruments and tools. Besides, there have been differentfield trials with real users from the three application sectors.

APRENCAT is the pilot project of an Internet audio-visual services platform for the diffusion of the Catalan academic community around the world. This project promoted by DURSI (Ministry of Universities, Research and information Society, Generalitat de Catalunya), Institut Ramon Llull and i2CAT Foundation, is aimed to develop a bandwidth audio- visual platform in orderto supportthe academic community of Catalan teachers and students from all over the world. The services carried out in order to create the pilot phase of the portal are the streaming services (live broadcast, on-demand videos), IP multipoint video conference services, and event and content recommendation.

The objective of this project is the creation of portal in IP network of audio-visual contents in the Internet of second generation. This portal has to become a window where users can follow what is going on in the Cultural Ring. In its first phase, it will give support to cataloging services, advanced search services, streaming services and punctuation and valuation services. Other services will be developed, such as portal administration tools, video management, tools for supporting the management and integration of other contents (mainly hypertext and images), a portal content and event advisor, a programmed live events calendar, community tools (blog, forum...)

The Linguamon Audiovisual project puts togetherthe audiovisual services channel ofthe Casa de les Llengues (The Languages Home) and enables the sharing and management of audio-visual resources in different languages (advanced search, videoforums, chats...). It also has more services which enable live interaction of people located in any geographical spot (video conference). The highlights of the Linguamon portal are the to promote the preservation, use, recognition and learning of worldwide languages, to promote the respect towards the world language diversity, to contribute to the value of learning languages as a personal and collective development tool, to demonstrate the project success models internationally which facilitate the languages coexistence in the same territory or between a group of people, to enable the presence of the minority languages in Internet and promote the use and development oftechnological resources in orderto facilitate the multilingual communication, and to manage multilingual services.

The integration of advanced telemonitoring and telecontrol services in large installations (water management systems, energy distribution networks, environmental sensor networks, etc.) operating in metropolitan environments offers significant advantages in their management and use. This has been shown with the development of the project TIC2003-08129, in which the generic architecture of a monitoring and control system has been defined. This system operates in an urban environment over a mixed heterogeneous network (public and private) including ad-hoc wireless networks in some of its extreme nodes. Protocols have been developed which give support to real time services (image transmission and control information coming from programmable automatons and/or sensors), and implemented in a real application in the system constructed in the demonstrator built into the installation provided by EPO (Valencia City Council Water System). Related to the continuous media services, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) was identified as a firm candidate to being used. In this proposal a step goes away beyond, proposing SIP as the signaling framework that can integrate all and each one of the continuous media services, not only videoconferencing, but streaming or also even alert. This original proposal of the applicant group is called SIP-CMI (SIP continuous media integration) and allows a client to access to any continuous media service just with a SIP client and the ability to render the received media and to transmit it. Problems directly appear, as the way to control the streaming media, for example, since it could be the RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) protocol. In general, therefore, the continuous media services will be provided using SIP, whereas the rest of services of general purpose is provided, more and more, in a service oriented architecture, SOA, and in particular, by means of WEB services. In this project the way to integrate this duality will be proven and validated in a framework or common architecture. On the other hand, both types of services, based on classic client-server architecture do not adapt at all when a part of the network is auto configurable, as it is the case of a network of a control and monitoring premises. In this project, solutions will set out so that these services SIP and WEB they are also auto configurable, and these solutions not only will come from new service level proposals, but also for network level. The result of this project will be a SIP and WEB service provisioning platform, integrated in a common architecture, oriented to services of telemonitoring and telecontrol in great premises (water management systems, energy distribution networks, environmental sensors networks, etc.) operating in metropolitan areas, in which the designed and validated proposals will be demonstrated at network level and at service level.

The DRMSolution NG project aims at creating an innovative technological solution which solves the problem associated to the management of digital rights, through the design of new services, in an inter-operable and safe framework. This project is based on some approved and recently closed standards but still without important implementations at a commercial level (OMA DRM V2.X). Other additional technologies (such as Windows Media DRM) as well as IMS networks are analyzed.

Euro-NF is a European project on the Network of the Future, formed by 35 institutions (from the academia and industry) from 16 countries. Its main target is to integrate the research effort of the partners to be a source of innovation and a think tank on possible scientific, technological and socio-economic trajectories towards the network of the future. Euro-NF is a Network of Excellence supported by the theme "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)" under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community for RTD.