Different market segments' (such as manufacturing, automotive industry, healthcare, ambient assistant living, public events, home automation, utilities, etc.) applications and services have to share the same wireless infrastructure and the same spectral bands, making it challenging to meet the diverging QoS requirements simultaneously. Orca addresses this issues at different levels. Concerning the societal impact, ORCA can offer the tools to accelerate the development of radio and network solutions, providing experimentation facilities to enable the testing of new technologies to serve in all the aforementioned applications. The solutions developed in ORCA include efforts to reduce latency, which is particularly important for critical communication scenarios, such as public safety and healthcare. The solutions to be developed and tested within the scope of ORCA can help in the implementation of systems that directly address important environmental problems. Communication systems, including sensor networks, can be used in smart grids, smart homes, and future factories, in order to improve efficiency and reliability in energy generation, distribution, and consumption. Sensors can also be used to monitor wildlife environments, control deforestation, or report the use of hydric resources.
The ORCA project brings together multi-disciplinary expertise for addressing the following overall needs:
1. END-TO-END SPECTRUM, USER AND NETWORK CONTROL NEED: The need for autonomous and intelligent end3to3end user and network control that can on the fly adapt settings to a dynamic (often heterogeneous) wireless context and changing application requirements and the need for controlling and optimising the usage of spectrum, hardware and energy resources, achieving multiple heterogeneous network slices sharing the same underlying infrastructure and spectrum.
2. REAL-TIME SDR BRIDGED TO SDN NEED: The need for versatile network architectures (such as Massive MIMO, Cloud RAN, infrastructure sharing) beyond the traditional cellular or ad hoc architectures and the need for SDR platforms with advanced capabilities that are not available on the market today.
3. ACCELERATED AND EARLY EXPERIMENTATION NEED: Today development cycles of multiple years are the painful reality, not only requiring significant manpower investments, but also causing the innovation process to slow down. One of the major contributors to the long development cycles is the lack of proper development and testing environments.
The OVERALL OBJECTIVES can be formulated as follows:
Objective 1: To accelerate flexible end-to-end network experimentation by making open and modular software and hardware architectures available that smartly use novel versatile radio technology, more specifically real-time Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms meeting the requirements in terms of runtime latencies, throughput, and fast reconfiguration and reprogramming.
Objective 2: To offer experimental facilities, with SDR devices incorporating relevant software and hardware building blocks that allow easy design, implementation and programming, while also achieving low runtime delay allowing end-to-end networking experimentation.
Objective 3: To offer Cognitive Radio as a Service (CRaaS) to the wireless research community and wireless innovation creators by giving easy access to a worldwide, open and ready-to-go test environment with real-time, reconfigurable and reprogrammable SDR devices.
ORCA consortium has successfully reached all objectives and milestones.
Actions taken for technical achievements are described more in depth in the next section,the main efforts are the design of pioneering mmWave system in 26 GHz bands, the realizationn multi-RAT platform on SDR, the full stack opensource Wi-Fi design, and Self Interference Cancellation for Full duplex communication, and the vision and prototyping of a hierarchical and distributed orchestration for end-to-end network slicing.
