OPERATIVE UNIT

Università di Palermo - Engineering Department

UNIPA | Palermo

The UNIPA telecommunication laboratory involved in this research project, located in the Engineering Department, deals with the design, evaluation and testing of network protocols, with particular reference to wireless technologies.

The most recent research activities have focused on architectures for reprogrammable 5G network nodes, on coexistence problems and cooperation strategies between heterogeneous technologies coexisting in unlicensed bands (WiFi, LTE-U, ZigBee), on the development of smart solutions for dynamic and automatic reconfiguration of networks, on long-range low-power technologies (such as LoRa) for IoT (Internet of Things) applications, on the development of transducers and modulations for underwater transmissions. Many of these activities have been carried out within H2020 projects, including the WiSHFUL project on the definition of infrastructures for testing and experimental evaluation of network protocols, the Flex5Gware project on 5G technologies and the SymbIoTe project on IoT technologies. The lab currently hosts 3 post-doc researchers and 4 PhD students. The lab also carries out experimentation activities for the academic spin-off companies.

Equipment: the laboratory has 4 WARP Software-Defined-Radio platforms with integrated FPGAs and 5 USRP Software-Defined-Radio platforms of the N200 family of National Instruments, for the realization of prototypes of wireless nodes based on innovative (non-standard) physical and medium access layers. It also has a spectrum analyzer, mobile devices with google tango project support, several embedded wireless boards (alix), programmable
directional antennas and numerous computers with commercial wireless network cards. 

TNA Offer

The TNA projects can be related to the various activities carried out at UNIPA. The telecommunications lab in Palermo hosts 4 WARP Software-Defined-Radio platforms with integrated FPGAs and 5 USRP Software-Defined-Radio platforms of the N200 family from National Instruments, for prototyping wireless nodes based on innovative (non-standard) physical and medium access layers. It also has a spectrum analyzer and several computers with commercial wireless network cards. Recently the wireless testbed is developing and testing Beyond-5G network solutions at radio and core levels, exploiting the capabilities of softwarized access/core network technology. It will enable researchers to deploy and experiment with end-to-end networks where the classical operational and control boundaries between networks, computing and devices are becoming less distinct. The testbed will host 3 gNodeB (gNB), which are responsible for the radio attachment between User Equipment (UE) and the Core network’s interfaces. 5G smartphone devices will be deployment on testbed. Multiple nodes placement will be automatically managed from testbed by enhanced cleaning robot (e.g. Roomba customized device to support remote control and UE interface), also useful for testing positioning algorithms. The complete ecosystem will be designed to integrate, customize, and enhance the latest Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) hardware/software technologies.
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