About

About
The SAMURAI project is a research project funded by the Flemish agency for innovations by Science and Technology (IWT)
  • Starting date: 1 januari 2015
  • Project duration: 4 years
 
Project summary  

We live in a connected world, and important applications rely on the availability of high-performance reliable wireless communication. However, it is hard to maintain the competitive position as a Flemish company within the rapidly growing market of connected, wireless products. With typical batch sizes of 10 000 products, for our larger companies, the global wireless chipset manufacturers offer no support for custom improvements on off-the-shelf radio chipsets. Hence, our innovative companies are under pressure to become followers instead of innovators, or need to increase their efforts and budgets to design and redesign the wireless communication stack in their products. In order to develop innovative wireless solutions at limited cost & development efforts, the communication architecture has to move away from closed vertical solutions and evolve to open horizontal platforms that can be shared in multiple application domains.To this end, several  low-level radio challenges need to be solved.

  • The standard operation of wireless technologies and protocols is often insufficient, and several custom tweaks and adaptations of the radio control software are required to meet specific application needs. As such, innovative custom radio solutions are needed. 
  • In order to achieve this innovation at limited cost & development efforts, the communication architecture has to evolve from closed vertical solutions to open horizontal platforms that can be reused in multiple application domains. Applications and devices will remain domain specific. However, the network protocols and technologies that offer communication services to applications running on domain specific devices, should be shared, avoiding repeated design and development costs in each vertical market. As such, universal modular radio control software is needed. 
  • Innovative radio solutions furthermore require various degrees of adaptation or tuning. First, the radio application should automatically be optimized for the current hardware platform, wireless technology of vertical application domain. Second, as the wireless communication scene is very diverse and dynamic, any reliable protocol should be adaptive. As such, reconfiguration intelligence is needed.
Project outputs

As tangible output of the project, we target:

  • a generic radio control software architecture with validated, simplified interfaces to applications;
  • runtime adaptive network applications for time-critical radio control, for virtualized control over high-latency links, and for QoS control of wireless extension cards;
  • a network operational intelligence service that statistically characterizes the wireless medium, finds and solves bugs using a cloud repository and allows to predict the impact of reconfiguration decisions using a limited set of metrics
List of participating partners