L’équipe Agora était connue sous le nom d’Urbanet jusqu’au 1er janvier 2017. Trouvez ci-après les rapports de recherche de l’équipe – à l’époque Urbanet – des années précédentes.
Overall objectives
The main focus of the Agora team is on the specific challenges when considering wireless network architectures dedicated to urban environments, including connected and smart cities. The smart city represents a constantly reshaped concept, embracing the future of dense metropolitan areas. It refers to efficient and sustainable infrastructure, improving citizens’ quality of life, and protecting the environment. However, a consensus on the Smart City philosophy is that it will be primarily achieved by leveraging a clever integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban tissue.
Indeed, ICTs enable an evolution from the current duality between the physical world and its digitized counterpart to a continuum in which digital content and applications seamlessly interact with classical infrastructures and services. Smart Cities are often described by their digital services, which are inherently dependent on dense measurements of the city environment and activities, the collection of this data, its processing into information, and its redistribution. Therefore, the networking infrastructure is critical in enabling advanced services, particularly the wireless infrastructure that supports high user density and mobility.
From a wireless networking viewpoint, the digitization of cities can be seen as a paradigm shift extending the Internet of Things (IoT) to a citizen-centric model to leverage the massive data collected by pervasive sensors, connected mobile or fixed devices, and social applications. We aim to capture these aspects and design network architectures and protocols that are relevant to them.
In addition to our focus on ICTs in urban areas, we also work on their extension to any scenario where coverage challenges meet high density, such as satellite-IoT constellations or networks for rural and geographically isolated areas.
While our work is grounded on the properties of the wireless technologies we study, including a significant experimental dimension, our ambition is to address more general scientific challenges of network architectures. We can cluster these architectures into three main kinds:
- Carefully deployed topologies such as cellular networks and environmental monitoring,
- Planned and dynamic topologies such as a fleet of drones and satellite communications,
- Uncontrolled topologies, such as individual IoT and self-deployable networks.
The team aims to contribute to the following consequent challenges of data collection wireless networks in smart environments:
