European Commission "Information and Communication Technologies" (ICT), 7th Framework

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
British Telecom Plc.
Deutsche Telekom AG
NEC Europe Ltd.
Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland AG
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS)
University College Dublin , National University of Ireland
AGH University of Science and Technology Cracow

January 2008 to December 2010

The CARMEN project is a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) co-funded by the European Commission under the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).

Project goal is to develop an architecture and the underlying technology for building wireless mesh networks capable of delivering carrier grade services at significantly reduced capital and operational expenditures. The architecture design will support the flexible integration of heterogeneous radio and MAC technologies, such as 802.11, 802.16 and DVB. Furthermore, it will build on self-configuration and self-management principles to reduce the time and effort of deployment as well as to optimize the mesh network's performance during operation.

A key research objective is to design a radio and MAC technology abstraction that allows mesh management and control functions to handle radio links in a uniform, technology-agnostic manner. This allows the project to co-develop novel radio technologies and medium access control mechanisms that improve the performance and reliability of mesh links without breaking the compatibility with higher level mesh management and control functions. On the other hand, this abstraction should only have a minimal impact on the achievable performance of the network.

Another important research objective is to jointly design the functions for routing of unicast and multicast traffic, for capacity handling and for seamless mobility management to exploit the topology and structure of wireless mesh networks and to be able to meet most exigent quality of service requirements.

Furthermore, the project will study self-configuration and self-management approaches allowing the mesh network to be set up with minimal configuration overhead, to optimally allocate the network's resources, to adapt the network to a dynamically varying radio environment and to provide a timely response in case of failure of single network elements.

NEC is both technical project coordinator and leader of the work package on data transport, where it will, among other things, contribute its expertise in the areas of efficient, capacity-aware routing and mobility management.

Please find the project's publications at the official CARMEN web site.

For more information please use our contact form.

Official CARMEN Web Site.