VirtuOR

By 2020, two major lines should be developed: Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities. These aspects are mutually dependent and complementary. They will use the power of ubiquitous network infrastructure to connect all parts of a city (things) and to transfer data faster, securely and in real time.

When we consider the IoT and the Smart City, the importance of a broadband network becomes apparent. Things in a city will be connected via wireless sensor network and the collected data will be transferred via Wi-Fi or Internet networks to management systems (sink points). The convergence between pervasive sensing and networking is a major challenge. Today, the wireless sensor networks suffer from many limits such as low bandwidth, limited processing power, poor QoS performance (delay, jitter, etc.), etc.

Our project deals with these issues. It aims to ensure the convergence between sensor and broadband networks. Our solution provides network boxes as an intermediary between sensors and their Cloud service providers. Our VirtuOR boxes offer an easy access between the central “sink point” and its applications or data management systems hosted within the Cloud. These boxes help to make “sink points” more intelligent, perform better and deploy them on-demand as Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). The resources (CPU, memory, etc.) needed by these sink nodes may be adjustable to suit data operations (correlation, mining, analysing, etc.). Another major benefit of our boxes is to bring the service closer to the sensors. For example, if a sensor needs a monitoring service from the Cloud, it can have locally a virtual access to this service. A single VirtuOR box could support several “sink points” from different providers at the same time. This can help to make decisions faster, more accurate, and without wasting network resources.

The Team

Our team is made up of 5 members:
– Guy Pujolle is the CEO, who is responsible for the growth and management of the global business. In this project, he will be responsible for both the monetization and management of successive stages of the project.
– Othmen Braham is the chief technical director. In this project, he will oversee all technical issues. He is the responsible for making technical decisions to develop the presented idea.
– Ines Ayadi: is an R&D engineer. She is responsible for studying the architecture of the solution and writing papers and technical reports.
– Oussema Stiti is an R&D engineer. He studies the virtualization of wireless networks, particularly the WI-FI access node. In this project, he will be responsible for the virtualization of the sink nodes and access points.
– Tarek Rabia is an R&D engineer. He is the responsible for the creation of virtual network solutions. He is an expert on network quality management tools such as DPDK and ODP.