Our daily life is surrounded by a growing number of sensors and communication devices. This is a trend that opens new opportunities for numerous new applications which will revolutionise our social and professional life. This will become only possible if users, computers and physical objects are intelligently networked to allow an ubiquitous wireless communication.

The concept of a smart city allows a system-wide integration of different mobile and context sensitive services. Herein, a cooperative communication over communication and interaction platforms occurs between mobile sensor nodes such as mobile phones, PDA’s and navigation devices, to mention a few.

Cooperative sensor communication is a key technology in numerous areas, including health management, logistics, supporting systems and personalised information management.

Applications can be found in:

• Car-to-Car and Car-to-X communication

• Environment monitoring and protection

• Online health monitoring

• Logistics

Research in Cocoon is structured in four main areas:

A – Networking aspects

Conceptual design of new architectures for wireless networks as a foundation for an integrating communication infrastructure that enables numerous and diverse applications, which are not realisable with existing network structures.

B – Signal processing

Development of advanced algorithms for an integrating communication infrastructure. The algorithms take into account the requirements found in a smart city such as a high number of communication nodes, a high density of nodes and heterogenous transmission protocols.

C – Transceiver architectures

Design and modelling of dynamically reconfigurable transceiver architectures that include fully controllable High Frequency frontends.

D – Integration and verification

Integration of the solutions from the areas networking aspects, signal processing and transceiver architectures in view of interference suppression, optimisation of energy consumption, channel capacity and quality of service.

University Kassel

Hydrotechnik GmbH, Limburg

mimoOn GmbH, Duisburg

Saphymo GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

CST AG, Darmstadt

Deutsche Telekom AG, Darmstadt