Projects

European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme

TALON - Autonomous and self-organized artificial intelligent orchestrator for a greener industry 4.0

Next-generation industrial systems promise to deliver unprecedented excellence not only in terms of performance, but also explainability, trustworthiness and transparency. To achieve this new objectives, state-of-the-art concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), edge-to-cloud (E2C) computing, blockchain, and visualisation need to be de-risked and applied. Motivated by this, TALON aims at sculpturing the road towards the next Industrial revolution by developing a fully-automated AI architecture capable of bringing intelligence near the edge in a flexible, adaptable, explainable, energy and data efficient manner. TALON architecture consists of three fundamental pillars: a) an AI orchestrator that coordinates the network and service orchestrators in order to optimise the edge vs cloud relationship, while boosting reusability of datasets, algorithms and models by deciding where each one should be placed; b) a lightweight hierarchical blockchain schemes that introduce new service models and applications under a privacy and security umbrella; and c) new digital-twin empowered transfer learning and visualization approaches that enhance AI trustworthiness and transparency. It combines the benefits of AI, edge and cloud networking, as well as blockchain and DTs, optimized by means ofù a) new key performance indicators that translate the AI benefits into insightful metrics; b) novel theoretical framework for the characterisation of the AI; c) blockchain used to deliver personalised & perpetual protection based on security, privacy and trust mechanisms; d) AI approaches for automatically and co-optimising edge and cloud resources as well as the AI execution nodes; e) semantic AI to reduce the learning latency and enhance reusability; and f) digital twins that visualize the AI outputs and together with human-in-the-loop approaches. All the technological breakthroughs are demonstrated, validated and evaluated by means of proofof-concept simulation and four real-world pilots

Coritel is developing the prototype for the Image Anonymization service as part of the Talon Project, specifically in demonstrators "AR/VR for Training & Maintenance" and "Human-Robot Collaboration". Additionally, the prototype's performance must be characterized using selected datasets to assess its effectiveness and ensure seamless integration with other module.


European Commission – Seventh Framework Program

Integrated Project IDEALIST - Industry-Driven Elastic and Adaptive Lambda Infrastructure for Service and Transport Networks

Traffic demand is increasing dramatically, year on year, with typical growth figures of up to 60% for Internet based traffic. Such traffic increase is impacting on both network costs and power consumption. Moreover, traffic is not only increasing but becoming much more dynamic, both in time and direction.

For these reasons, transport network evolution from current DWDM systems towards elastic optical networks, based on flexgrid transmission and switching technologies, could significantly increase both transport network scalability and flexibility. Further benefits come from multilayer interworking mechanisms enabling electronic switching technologies (IP/MPLS, OTN, etc.) to directly control the bandwidth of the Bandwidth Variable Transponders (BVT) for optical bandwidth optimization purposes.

This then defines the key objective behind IDEALIST: To research in detail a cost and power efficient transport network architecture able to carry a wide range of signal bandwidths, each of which will be varying in real time in direction and magnitude, and some of which will be extremely large and possibly exceeding 1Tb/s. The network architecture proposed by IDEALIST is based on four technical pillars:

  • Transport systems enabling flexible transmission and switching beyond 400Gbps per channel
  • Control plane architecture for multilayer and multi-domain elastic optical networks
  • Dynamic network resources allocation at both IP and elastic optical layers
  • Multilayer network optimization tools enabling both off-line planning and on-line network re-optimization in elastic optical networks.

The intention is that the IDEALIST network architecture will be easily industrialized. Therefore, feasibility studies and experimental implementation and demonstration of prototypes will be key activities, as well. IDEALIST will also feed the collaboration with other Projects and the submission of contributions to ITU-T, OIF, IETF, thus reinforcing European position in standardization bodies.

CoRiTeL is contributing in the project supporting the design phase of the target node by validating flexi-ROADM solutions through a cost and power consumption analysis. In addition it will perform power consumption measuring of different technologies and node components adopted in the test-bed implementation.

Main contribution in developing software for node management and defining control plane architecture for elastic network will be also provided.


European Commission – Seventh Framework Program

Network of Excellence EURO-NF - Anticipating the Network of the Future - From Theory to Design

Euro-NF is a European project on the Network of the Future, formed by 35 institutions (from the academia and industry) from 16 countries. Its main target is to integrate the research effort of the partners to be a source of innovation and a think tank on possible scientific, technological and socio-economic trajectories towards the network of the future. Euro-NF is a Network of Excellence supported by the theme "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)" under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community for RTD.

CoRiTeL was Work Package Leader of WP JRA 1.2 : Metro and Core architectures, and contributed to WP JRA 2.2, and WP JRA 2.4, as well to the dissemination activities with responsibility of WP SEA 6.1.


Network of Excellence

BONE – Building the future Optical Network in Europe

The core activity of the BONE-project is the stimulation of intensified collaboration, exchange of researchers and integration of activities and know-how into and amongst partners. Through the establishment of Virtual Centers of Excellence, the BONE-project looks into the future and builds and supports the final “Network of the Future” through education & training, research tools & testlabs on new technologies & architectures. The leading-edge position of European Research in the field and, consequently, of European industry, could be threatened by returning to an uncoordinated and scattered approach to optical networking research. BONE consolidates the process, supported during FP6, of integration and reorganization of research efforts across European academic and industrial groups in FP7.


Integrated project

STRONGEST - Scalable, Tunable and Resilient Optical Networks Guaranteeing Extremely-high Speed Transport

STRONGEST’s main goal is to design and demonstrate an evolutionary ultra-high capacity multilayer transport network, based on optimized integration of optical and packet nodes, and equipped with a multi-domain, multi-technology control plane, overcoming the problems of current networks that still provide limited scalability, are not cost-effective and do not properly guarantee end-to-end quality of service.

STRONGEST is an industry led project; the consortium brings together major European industrial players, leading Telecom operators, Universities and Research Centers and as such, it enables the necessary synergies and creates an ideal environment for innovation and development.

A major impact from STRONGEST will be to strengthen the position of European industry in the field of Future Internet and to reinforce European leadership in optical networks technologies. The design of a more efficient transport network with reduced cost per bit and the particular attention to energy efficiency will turn into benefit to the entire Community.

Network Operators have a tough target to reduce CO2 emissions, whilst at the same time supporting significantly higher information bandwidth. They will use the results of STRONGEST, which will provide the optimum transport network architecture to achieve these targets. STRONGEST results will be exploited by Vendors to develop traffic engineering solutions running in multi-technologies and multi-domain context, and the related control plane in both legacy nodes and new optical/packet nodes.
Academic Partners plan to use the STRONGEST results for further enhancement of knowledge transfer, and training and skills creation in the field of telecommunication networks, particularly in the field of optical networks.

Coritel contribution to STRONGEST was research activity on a novel control architecture based on multi-layer PCE and GMPLS control plane for new generation packet-opto networks


Italian Republic - Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca

Evolution Evoluzione funzionale e tecnologica di sottosistemi di rete TLC per il supporto di soluzioni applicative in scenari Smart City (EVO-SMART)

The process of progressive ICT technologies and services integration in all areas of social urban life is driving metropolitan environments towards “Smart City” scenarios, which aim to facilitating access to information, making easier the usage of services offered by public and private organizations both by single users and companies, thus contributing to a sustainable economic development of urban areas.

As a matter of fact, a “Smart City” urban environment features a widespread availability of services addressed to citizens, which are able to simplify and speed up access and usability for a wide variety of information sources and applications, related to the use of public and social facilities which are thus made available through automated and highly integrated procedures.

“Smart City” services refer to a great variety of info-com services, such as: remote control of power consumption, networks for environmental control, e-healthcare, e-learning and e-entertainment platforms, ICT infrastructures for homeland security, e-government, platforms for remote monitoring, mechanisms to make the use of advanced technologies easier for inexperienced users, availability of “Internet of Things” services, automatic payments through mobile terminals, etc.
Such services can be divided into three main categories: information exchange services among single users, services provided by public or public organizations, acquisition of information from a great variety of possible sources. All the different kinds of services are characterized by the need for a wide transmission bandwidth, homogeneous procedures for service access, powerful tools for dynamic configuration and management of network nodes, as well as functionalities guaranteeing high security standards both for single nodes and in relation to external threats carried by means of the IP protocol.