Motivation

Mobility has become a central aspect of the lives of European citizens – in business, education, and leisure. Due to rapid technological and societal changes, there has been a bewildering proliferation of technologies and services for mobile users. This has created a complex and confusing communications environment for both users and network operators. Further development of existing technologies, and the addition of new ones in Beyond 3G (B3G) systems, will necessitate a rethinking of fundamental technological issues in order to create user-centred and manageable communication infrastructures for the future.

The vision of DAIDALOS is of a world in which:

• Mobile users can enjoy a diverse range of personalized services – seamlessly supported by the underlying technology and transparently provided through a pervasive interface
• Mobility has been fully established through open, scalable and seamless integration of a complementary range of heterogeneous network technologies
• Network and service operators are able to develop new business activities and provide profitable services in such an integrated mobile world.

Objectives

The objective of DAIDALOS is to develop and demonstrate an open architecture based on a common network protocol (IPv6), that becomes a significant step towards approaching the DAIDALOS vision. The overall DAIDALOS objectives are to:

• Design, prototype and validate the necessary infrastructure and components for efficient distribution of services over diverse network technologies beyond 3G,
• Integrate complementary network technologies to provide pervasive and user-centred access to these services,
• Develop an optimized signalling system for communication and management support in these networks,
• Demonstrate the results of the work through strong focus on user-centered and scenario-based development of technology.

Four technical workpackages have been defined (WP1-4) in order to achieve this objective, and a 5th (WP5) for integration activities. More information on WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5.

DAIDALOS is an Integrated Project in the Thematic Priority ‘Information Society Technologies’ of EU Framework Programme 6 for Research and Development, which is currently in its second phase (phase 1: IST-2002-506997, phase 2: IST-2005-026943). The project budget of DAIDALOS phase 1 amounted to € 25.7 million, of which € 14.7 million was funded by the European Commission. Phase 1 had 46 partners from industry and academia, and a duration of 2.5 years. The budget of DAIDALOS phase 2 is € 22.1 million, of which € 13.8 million is funded by the European Commission. There are 37 partners from industry and academia involved in Phase 2 of the project. Phase 2 is planned to conclude by the end of 2008.

Partners

There are 37 partners from Europe and Asia involved in the second phase of the DAIDALOS project.