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.
