RUNES
Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems

The Second RUNES Project Meeting took place in Aachen during 1-4 Feb 2005. Over 50 participants had the opportunity to work together on technical issues related to the various work packages and decide on future actions. The central theme of the project meeting was the application scenarios and the specification of the RUNES demonstrator.

Just prior to the meeting, a technical tutorial on Simics was presented by Dr Mikael Bergqvist, Senior Application Engineer at Virtutech AB. Simics is a system level instruction set simulator that emulates computer architectures at the level of individual instructions. A key feature of Simics is that it appears to the drivers, firmware, operating system and to all applications as if they run on real hardware. Examples of current deployments of Simics include: software development on unfinished hardware and debugging of entire network systems. The portability of Simics into simulations of large scale networks of wireless sensors was a key discussion topic.

Simics tutorial by Virtutech.

The session related to the application scenarios benefited by the contributions of two invited speakers, João Tasso F. B. Sousa and Christophe Dugas who apart from presenting related projects that they have been involved in, had the opportunity to gain insights into the RUNES platform under development by participating in several of the informal discussions.

Dr João Tasso F. B. Sousa an academic at the Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory of the University of Porto in Portugal gave a presentation entitled Challenges in a disaster scenario. A number of recent projects were outlined including IES, KOS, and PISCIS. The theme of the rest of the talk was on natural disasters and technological accidents. His talk closed with a description of the environmental and system factors that the RUNES demonstator should consider should a decision be made to realize solutions related to the disaster recovery scenario.

USLT and disaster scenario presentation.

Christophe Dugas, the Director of Marketing & Communications at Coronis Systems in Montpellier, France gave a presentation on ultra low power and long range wireless solutions. He started with an overview of the history and technology of Coronis Systems which was motivated by the need to meet requirements such as low amounts of data, long autonomy, low traffic, high link budget and openess to existing wide area networks. Wavenis, their proprietary technology, provides complete wireless solutions comprising the hardware and the protocol stack. In addition, Wavenis features Bluetooth extension capabilities. A short review of the product specification was followed by a discussion of a number of healthcare applications that have taken place in France.

Presentation on ultra low power wireless systems by Coronis Systems.