Role in the project

LINKS foundation (Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society) will be involved in the Italian Pilot Site and will provide G5/LTE hybrid On Board Units and Road Side Units. LINKS will work on several technologies, both in highway and in urban use cases, focusing on the following ones: communication protocols, ETSI MEC solutions and image processing methods. One distinguishing investigation addressed by LINKS concerns the use of MEC inside the G5/LTE Road Side Units, for advanced vehicular services.

LINKS is also leader of the WP8: “Evaluation and Impact Assessment” and will focus on the technical evaluation of the project results. Finally, LINKS will lead the task about standardization activities.

About Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society

LINKS foundation results from a process of merger by incorporation involving the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella (www.ismb.it) and Istituto Superiore sui Sistemi Territoriali per l’Innovazione (www.siti.polito.it) and will take advantage of 15 years of their background intellectual properties and competences.

The two legal entities will be officially merged by becoming part of the newborn LINKS Foundation - Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society, a non-profit private Foundation which will take over all the obligations, rights and legal relationships. The brand new project of LINKS raise new challenges that its 140 employees have been ready to tackle and to make LINKS a center of excellence. LINKS is an interdisciplinary hub built on top of heterogeneous competences of its team made of people from different education, fields and sectors. This heterogeneity of competences is at the base of the innovation process creation and its application to different domains.

The ICT skills of LINKS are currently clustered in research areas focused on some specific sectors: computing infrastructure based on cloud and for electromagnetic simulation (Advanced Computing & Electromagnetics), optical communications and optoelectronics (Applied Photonics), use of ICT as a strategic tool for the promotion of sustainable development (Innovation Development), mobile solutions and data management (Mobile Solutions), wireless systems for the effective delivery of Internet services under mobility (Multi-Layer Wireless Solutions), technologies and systems related to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (Navigation Technologies), wireless sensor networks and technologies enabling the paradigm of the Internet of Things (Pervasive Technologies)

The research area involved in the project is Multi-Layer Wireless solutions (MLW). They investigate solutions for the access, network architectures and applications aimed at the effective delivery of Internet services under mobility. The topic reflects two technological trends: the ever growing wireless connectivity (and availability of flexible end-devices) and the paradigm of Internet of services, with services – rather than contents – driving the evolution of Internet.