“TACTILENet: Towards Agile, effiCient, auTonomous and massIvely LargE Network of things”

We are witnessing an unprecedented worldwide growth of mobile data traffic that is expected to continue at an annual rate of 45% over the next years, reaching 30.5 exabytes per month by 2020. To handle this “data tsunami”, the emerging 5th generation (5G) systems need to improve the net- work performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput and user experienced delay, and at the same time make a better use of the network resources such as wireless bandwidth and backhaul link capacity. The landscape toward 5G wireless communication is currently unclear, and, despite the efforts of academia and industry in evolving traditional cellular networks, the enabling technology for 5G is still obscure. The vision for the 5th generation of mobile networks (5G) includes at its heart the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, leading to a new era of connectivity where billions of devices exchange data and instill intelligence in our everyday life. The EU has set out to play a leading role in developing 5G technologies by consolidating and building upon the most important research and innovation results attained in previous research programs. The objective of the TACTILENet  project is to bring together the complementary expertise of European and third-country partners in order to lay the foundations for addressing basic issues in several facets of 5G networking. The cross-fertilization among partners will contribute to the ongoing research efforts by jointly identifying ambitious yet feasible goals for 5G system, addressing some of the fundamental research problems in achieving these goals, and finally, by designing and analyzing a suite of protocols. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690893.

TACTILENet represents an opportunity for the European research and industry to take the lead in Information and Communication Technologies, capitalizing on the area in which Europe always had the potential to succeed, namely wireless networking. Europe possesses significant potential in individuals and research groups that can bring real breakthroughs in the way wireless networks are perceived, operated and controlled. We believe that through collaboration with third country partners that are experts in the field, TACTILENet can provide technological advance to the European industry. Research within TACTILENet can also create new business opportunities for SMEs since the novel techniques that will be developed will provide significant opportunities. One major example toward this direction is the exploitation in practice of benefits of the integration of RF energy harvesting with collaborative sensor fusion, which still remains unexplored. TACTILENet will provide strong incentives for collaborative research in Europe. The participating partners possess complementary expertise in different aspects of networking and this project will increase their competitiveness in Europe and in the world.