Company Description:
The Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), located in Castelldefels (Barcelona), is a private non-profit R&D center with substantial funding support from the autonomous government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) along with research and development partnership with industry. Started in 2001 with young graduates, with engineering or PhD degrees, it is currently the only research institution where research and technology development are combined to provide response in the range of precompetitive research and engineering demonstration models. During the last ten years CTTC has managed to transform enthusiasm and capability, as the dominant skills, into competence, yet preserving the initial motivation for advanced research and innovation.
Research activities at the CTTC, both fundamental and applied, mainly focus on technologies related to the physical, data-link and network layers of communication systems, and to the Geomatics. So far, four distinct research divisions have been identified in the Research Unit: Communication Networks, Communication Subsystems, Communication Technologies and Geomatics. They all include both research and engineering profiles, in order to enable for cut-edge research and product-oriented activities.
The Communication Technologies Division (CTD) aims is to address the research to the most endeavouring challenges that future communications technologies will face: those of energy and bandwidth efficiency. CTD research has a strong experimental emphasis, achieved through the use of demonstrators and testbeds, and the focus is on component (subsystem) level and also on PHY and MAC layers. The Smart Energy Efficient Communication Technologies (SMARTECH) Department, part of the Communications Technologies Division (CTD), is led by Dr. Christos Verikoukis and involves research activities, both fundamental and experimental, focusing on technologies related to WSNs, WLANs and dense cellular networks. In particular, SMARTECH aims to provide advanced PHY layer solutions, cooperative network coding-assisted protocols, cognitive aware radio resource management schemes, network management protocols and power demand algorithms in order to improve the energy efficiency of the wireless technologies. Experimental activities include the development of a flexible platform for smart environments and a flexible tool for implementing advanced resource allocation schemes.
CTTC annually produces over 60 and 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, respectively. CTTC also manages an IPR portfolio of 67 granted patents, belonging to 20 families, awarded in different countries in EU, USA, Japan, and China. CTTC has over 15 years of experience in successfully managing and achieving EU funded project objectives, and has played a key role in a number of Horizon 2020 projects.
Role and main tasks within the project:
CTTC will develop the energy demand prediction algorithm for the application of the cooperative energy management scheme applied to self-organised grids by considering a deep reinforcement learning methodology, while also considering smart-contracts for the energy exchange procedure. CTTC will also contribute to WP5 by integrating the developed algorithms into the simulation platform. Moreover, CTTC is the WP6 leader where they coordinate the dissemination, communication, exploitations and standardization activities of the PROGRESSUS consortium.