N-CRAVE is structured in four technical workpackages (WP). Two additional workpackages (WP5 and WP6) are dedicated to project management and dissemination.

WP1: Foundational Aspects of Network Coding

The objective of this WP is to identify and quantify the benefits, requirements and challenges of network coding towards robustness, throughput and operational simplicity over dynamically changing networks with minimal infrastructure. This task will serve as a foundation for the rest of activities - work packages, providing a theoretical framework and performance bounds that will guide the development of layer-specific methodologies to be outlined in WP2 and WP3. This part of the work will also shape and motivate the development of the rest of the project by stressing specific aspects of the architecture.

WP2: Novel key access, network, transport and cross-layer methodologies

This WP aims at developing novel key protocol components that exploit network coding to enable new communication scenarios and are specifically suited for volatile environments. Novel schemes will be developed to support functionality of the access, network and transport layers of the traditional layer architecture. Cross-layer architectures, where the medium access, routing and flow control functionalities are supported jointly, augmented by network coding shall be investigated. While doing so, novel low complexity and overhead communication architectures suitable for volatile environments will be determined.

WP3: Application plane aspects of network coding

The objective of this WP is to exploit the benefits of network coding to optimize performance from an application layer point of view. This WP will address content distribution and storage issues in different wireless architectures with different structure, such as wireless mesh networks and isolated mobile internet worlds. Research and evaluation of the impact of network coding in distributed storage, video and other content distribution for providing maximum throughput and minimum latency will be carried out in this WP. Furthermore, the inherent properties of network coding will be exploited to fortify information transport against data corruption and other malicious actions.

WP4: Network coding experimentation

The algorithms developed in our theoretical investigation will be evaluated both by simulation and in a real life test-bed. Both venues for evaluation will be employed since very large scale simulation provides validation means hard to be matched by a real life test-bed, while on the other hand the test-bed provides a proof of concept capability that demonstrates beyond dispute the feasibility of the architecture. The architectural choices made in WP2 will form the basis on which we will develop the test-bed. This activity will setup a test-bed in order to implement, study and evaluate network coding schemes over wireless networks. The objective is to validate the high performance benefits provided by network coding.