Department of Engineering / News / EPSRC award £511,000 to fund 'The Intelligent Airport' project

Department of Engineering

EPSRC award £511,000 to fund 'The Intelligent Airport' project

EPSRC award £511,000 to fund 'The Intelligent Airport' project

Professor Ian White and Professor Richard Penty are part of a multidisciplinary team who have been awarded £511,000 from the EPSRC for their project 'The Intelligent Airport: A self-organising, Wired/wireless Converged Machine'. The team also includes Professor Jon Crowcroft from the Computer Laboratory and colleagues at UCL and Swansea.

Intelligent airport

Diverse communications applications are expected to appear in the future with complex and often varying service requirements, traffic profiles and user expectations. These will require extremely advanced adaptive computing and communication systems to provide users with mobile, secure and automatic means of conducting business. A prime application area is in international travel which continues to grow supported by a significant investment in infrastructure, such as Heathrow Terminal 5.

An intelligent, adaptive, self-organising wired/wireless infrastructure is essential in this environment. It is anticipated that the considerable growth in the complexity of this infrastructure will not just be due to the proliferation of established fixed equipment such as wireless base stations, surveillance cameras, security detection equipment, display and terminal equipment. The requirements will also be for a much wider deployment of more compact portable equipment, for example, location and control equipment on a wide range of transportation equipment. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags supported by a transparent optical-RF network can be used to sense, locate and track an array of objects including luggage, mobile assets and commercial goods and can provide additional features such as boarding pass auto-tags and access control tags. Mobile biometric sensors will be widely deployed in this environment providing advanced features. A range of fixed and mobile terminals will provide additional security measures such as chemical detection and analysis, while other terminals, fixed and mobile, will support passenger information and entertainment services on transit. The infrastructure will support an array of personal passenger and staff wireless media rich devices. The wired/wireless network envisaged will thus be huge and complex, supporting perhaps 10 million information sources, with an anticipated peak aggregate data rate of the order 100 Gbit/s in a relatively local access environment. This is beyond the capability of any current network and research is needed to understand the principles upon which an effective system could be constructed.

This ambitious and multidisciplinary project, is a collaborative programme, the project has strong industrial involvement and support from Laing O'Rourke who will provide the application context, share design experience, user requirements and architectural constraints, Red-M who will contribute propagation simulations and Ericsson who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, providing expertise from the user perspective. Equipment companies, including Motorola, are involved to ensure that expert advice is received across all areas within the project.

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