Projects @ GEMS

The Group is being active in European Research Projects, namely in the EU's 6th Framework Programme (FP6) STREP (Strategic Targeted Research Projects) and NOE (Network of Excelence), such as WIP (An All-Wireless Mobile Network Architecture) and CRUISE (CReating Ubiquitous Intelligent Sensing Environments). Internally, we have been mainly concentrated on WSN protocols and applications being one of the best examples the LEMeRoom project.

The research activities related with these projects have been focused on the Architectures, Protocols and Services for Ad-Hoc, Mesh and Sensor Networks, as well as some Applications for specific scenarios.

Regarding Mesh networks, GEMS is cooperating with the GROW group in the context of FP6-IST WIP (An All-Wireless Mobile Network Architecture) project in which IT participates with both Lisbon and Aveiro groups. In WIP we are mainly involved in the R&D of the Communities concept from a viewpoint of service support.

CRUISE is a NoE IST Project focused on communication and application aspects of WSN in Europe. GEMS group is participating in two of the nine technical workpackages of the project, contributing mainly to the applications and protocols areas.

Concerning internal projects, two localization systems were developed since 2005.

The first, focused on determining the position of trolleys in a Shopping Mall, uses the strength of the radio signal received at each sensor node (in the trolleys) to compute the relative distance among them; the global localization is calculated thanks to the information provided by a reduced number of anchor nodes. In this project, a combination of mapping and triangulation approaches was used in the design of the localization algorithm.

The second project - LEMe Room - was a joint cooperation between GEMS and the Intelligent MultiModal Interfaces (IMMI) group of LEMe to improve the interaction capabilities of the LEMe Room intelligent immersive environment. A WSN was built to track the position of users within the room so that position-dependent user interaction with the system become possible. LEMe Room positioning system is based on a WSN that interconnects a mobile sensor node (e.g. in a badge) on the target user to the anchor node infrastructure. The system uses ultrasound and radio waves and performs target multilateration based on the time difference of arrival between these two wave types.

These pages provide a deeper insight on such R&D work. If you are interested in some of these projects please feel free to contact us for providing comments and/or questions.