REsilient INteractive applications through hyper Diversity in Energy Efficient RadioWeaves technology

Project Information

REINDEER

Grant agreement ID: 101013425

DOI

10.3030/101013425

Project closed

EC signature date 8 December 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 4 644 460,00

EU contribution

€ 4 644 460,00

Coordinated by

TECHNIKON FORSCHUNGS- UND PLANUNGSGESELLSCHAFT MBH
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - REINDEER (REsilient INteractive applications through hyper Diversity in Energy Efficient RadioWeaves technology)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Wireless connectivity has become an essential resource, and people and applications will increasingly depend on (future) wireless networks, integrating richer services. In particular, the REINDEER project considers four application domains: Adaptive robotized factories, warehouses, and logistics, immersive entertainment for crowds of people, care environments, hospitals, and assisted living, and smart homes. In these domains, interactive applications are envisioned that require a high reliability and operate in ‘real-time’ and ‘real-space’, where the difference between the physical and the virtual world go unnoticed.
The REINDEER project develops novel RadioWeaves technology to enable these applications that raise the specifications drastically and also require novel functionality with respect to previous networks. This includes precise position information, and the possibility to interact with energy-neutral devices, that get powered through wireless transfer. The RadioWeaves technology is a smart connectivity platform realized as a fabric of distributed radio devices and computing resources, that offers consistently excellent service and is scalable to seemingly infinite network capacity at unprecedented energy efficiency. The interconnected distributed resources cooperate to dynamically serve heterogeneous applications. The project co-designs algorithms, architectures, and protocols for efficient deployment and operation of these distributed wireless networks. It thereby aims to achieve an unprecedented energy efficiency and bring an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude, to sustain the expected growth in mobile data while reducing the carbon footprint. A further objective is to realize an experimental proof of the main technological concepts.
The REINDEER project communicated and disseminated its results extensively, shared many of its key deliverables via open access, and also presented main innovation to harmonization and standardization initiatives.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To ensure relevance of the results for future applications, the project has started with a broad and in-depth analysis of use cases in the four focus application domains. The derived quantitative specifications further drive the R&D in the project. Beyond conventional simulation models, the project characterises real-life environments that may generate complicated responses, a.o. due to reflections. Dedicated measurement campaigns have been conducted to characterise channels and updated models have been derived.
Main technological results relate to efficient distributed architectures, trading-off local versus global connectivity and computing. Implementation bottlenecks are identified, showing that interconnect and memory accesses are becoming the main challenge, while architecture-aware algorithms can result in feasible signal processing complexity. The ambition to interact with energy-neutral devices is addressed with RadioWeaves technology developing novel methods to detect and power these devices. Distributed architectures are detailed including the hardware requirements to support efficient wireless energy transfer.
The REINDEER project has a strong focus on the algorithm-architecture co-design to support the three targeted functionalities in distributed large array infrastructures: reliable communication, accurate positioning, and wireless power transfer for interacting with energy-neutral devices. Significant progress has been achieved confirming that superior performance can be offered with respect to operation based on one central array, due to the beam-focusing capabilities and enhanced diversity. Specifically, algorithms are worked out that improve the overall system robustness for communication and positioning, being able to deal with calibration and synchronization offsets that are likely to occur in deployed systems. Coherent transmission from distributed Contact Service Points (CSPs) requires dedicated solutions to achieve the required phase-level synchronization. The latter has received substantial attention in the project, and innovative solutions that enable scalable cell-free operation have been developed.
Moreover, dedicated initial access schemes are developed to efficiently support sporadic traffic, as expected in many novel applications connecting a massive number of devices.
In preparation of the validation phase, the plan for wireless experiments has been detailed and the testbeds are being realized. Special attention has been paid to data management and a format to allow smooth exchange of measurement data has been elaborated. In addition to the testbeds, two complementary simulators are being developed to extend experiments to complex and varying scenarios, including hardware in the loop simulations.
The project provides a user-friendly website with ample information (https://reindeer-project.eu/) and has been actively creating project-related content, for example podcasts and blog posts, and sharing via social media channels. REINDEER has disseminated its vision and results towards the broad R&D community at several events. The partners have published a large number of papers over the past months. The results have been documented extensively in topical deliverables, many of which will become publicly available. Many patents have been filed on innovative solutions for distributed access architectures and algorithms for efficient operation in these architectures. In the REINDEER vimeo showcase some videos about the use cases, experiments and testbeds can be found: https://vimeo.com/showcase/reindeer-results-video-showcase

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The overall project results confirm the potential of RadioWeaves technology to improve wireless network performance-related KPIs. The REINDEER distributed platform can provide superior connectivity, both regarding capacity and other Quality-of-Service parameters such as reliability, at unprecedented energy efficiency,
We thereby adhere to the double strategic priority and ambition of Europe as expressed by:
- The Green Deal for making the EU’s economy sustainable and its
- The Strategy for Data aiming to available for use in the economy and society, while keeping the companies and individuals who generate the data in control.

The REINDEER project supports this double ambition and the potential impact will ultimately be found through the applications it will enable. These include the generation of new services, they may improve health care, and support sustainable cities. The architectures hosting distributed resources can drastically lower the total energy consumption of applications, at the expense of local compute engines. The secondary effects that dominate the ecological impact can serve different Sustainable Development Goals by enabling remote operation and support, for example for independent ageing.
As an important step, models and methods to assess energy consumption in distributed architectures in typical communication situations, are under development.

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