The INtelligent Airport (TINA)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Abstract
Diverse 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. The RFID tags will operate at low data rates, typically 64 kbit/s, but an airport environment can be expected to contain a few million of them. 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 order 500 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.As this is such an ambitious and multidisciplinary project, a collaborative programme is proposed. 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 and Marconi who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. At the outline proposal stage, we received feedback from EPSRC that they would welcome additional collaborations with those involved in airport operations. We are delighted that, in response, BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, and within UCL links have been made to Dr Paul Brennan, who will contribute substantial knowledge of RfID, being involved in a major European project in the area. Finally we have additionally sought to involve equipment companies including Motorola and Agilent to ensure that we can receive expert advice across all areas within the project.
Organisations
Publications
Satyanarayana D
(2009)
A Voronoi Based Energy Efficient Architecture for Wireless Networks
Satyanarayana D
(2010)
An Energy Efficient Network Architecture for Infrastructured Wireless Networks
Qazi B
(2009)
TINA: The INtelligent Airport
Qazi B
(2009)
Pico Cellular MAC Protocol for Multimedia Communication
Feng W
(2009)
Green ICT: Energy Efficiency in a Motorway Model
Feng W
(2010)
Lifetime evaluation in energy-efficient rectangular ad hoc wireless networks
in International Journal of Communication Systems
De Grado Vivero Á
(2009)
Indoor airport radio-over-fiber network traffic model and performance analysis using load-balancing techniques [Invited]
in Journal of Optical Networking
Bhattacharya, S.
(2010)
A 3-D markov chain model for a 3-D airport environment
Bhattacharya S
(2010)
A 3-D Markov Chain Model for a Multi-Dimensional Indoor Environment
B Qazi
(2010)
Performance Analysis of the TINA Network with Load Balancing Techniques
in Journal of Communications and Networks
Alani O
(2009)
Teletraffic Model for Indoor Wireless Communication Network
Alani O
(2009)
Mix Queues Approach for Indoor Network Traffic Modelling
Description | In airports the communication network traffic varies dynamically in space and time as passenger arrive in a terminal building typically within a relatively short time window and depart in groups. We have designed intelligent and adaptive communication networks that respond to these requirements. We developed passenger flow models, new network architectures that adapt to the dynamically varying traffic in an airport environment and new mathematical queueing models for the networks. We have generalised our results to other large installations. |
Exploitation Route | To model passengers flow in airports, design adaptive, flexible and dynamic communication networks that adapt to passengers flow in the airport. More generally the results can be applied in other large installations such as football stadiums, shopping venues and large enterprise premises. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Electronics Energy Environment Transport |
URL | http://intelligentairport.org.uk/ |
Description | Used by BAA to model passengers flow in typical setting in Heathrow airport |
First Year Of Impact | 2008 |
Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Electronics,Energy,Environment,Retail,Transport |
Impact Types | Societal Economic |