DIWINE considers wireless communication in a dense relay/node scenario where WNC (Wireless Network Coding) messages are flooded via dense massively air-interacting nodes in the self-contained cloud while the PHY air-interface between the terminals (sources/destinations) and the cloud is simple and uniform. A complex infrastructure cloud creates an equivalent air-interface to the terminal, which is as simple as possible.

Objectives:
Design of WNC coding and processing. The cloud uses WNC which performs all medium access tasks traditionally performed by routing and MAC directly at the PHY layer with potential large performance gains. In this way the functionality traditionally provided by cross-layer design is now implemented only on the PHY.
Distributed intelligence of the PHY cloud – design of WNC codes and processing for imperfect knowledge of signal and topology of interfering wireless nodes. Terminals do not use signalling or a priori knowledge of network structure. Only cloud nodes have internal imperfect knowledge of signals, complementary side information and network topology. Throughput/robustness/delay/memory/energy trade-off in delay-tolerant, information storage ad hoc networks.
Joint optimisation of energy and throughput. Energy consumption has two aspects: energy consumption (i) of terminals when communicating with the cloud, and (ii) within the cloud.
Design of simple and transparent terminal interfaces to the cloud.

IQUADRAT will develop a system level simulator to connect the theory of WNC to its practical implementation. We will stand at an intermediate point between theoretical partners and implementation partners to translate the theoretically developped techniques for WNC into feasible solutions for their implementation in real testbeds. The mix of theoretical and practical background at Iquadrat enables this interesting role in the project.

Partners: Technische Universität Dresden, Pepperl+Fuchs, Iquadrat, Toshiba Research Europe Limited, Politecnico di Milano, CTU Prague and University of York.