Thales Communications France S.A. is one of the few companies in the world to address all telecommunication segments. The Thales Communications portfolio includes secure infrastructures, Internets and intranets for government and defence. The company totalled revenues of 1 billion Euro in 2005 and is full subsidiary of the Thales group . The Thales Communications laboratory involved in the project is the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory (TAI) whose mandate is to investigate architectures and technologies for future networks and ICT systems within the Systems Engineering Architecture initiative in Thales Communications. TAI personnel includes network experts, especially for fixed and mobile IP network design, security architects for networks and information systems, information system experts on architecture and modelling aiming to increase adaptability and dependability.
As part of its Future Internet vision, the TAI team has been investigating disruptive and innovative solutions for networked services, radio systems and wireless sensor networks, resulting in high-level publications and patents. F-Lab represents a unique facility to experiment and validate complex and heterogeneous systems such as the ones that Thales Communications is developing. Taking this opportunity, Thales Communications will focus on the smart metering use case under the angles of system architectures, middleware and resource aware services.
In terms of R&D projects, Thales Communications is participating in the ANR SensLAB project for the specification of the management framework and the coordination of applications tasks. Thales Communications is evaluating Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols in the project under two perspectives: mobility management and energy efficient communications. In ICT OneLab2, Thales Communications also has key roles in tasks related to SAC (Situated Autonomic Communications) throught the integration of DTN environments and to wireless by contribution to the OneLab2 management framework. Thales Communications's involvement in the OneLab2 project is focused on specific issues inside the addressed sub-systems. Within F-Lab Thales Ciommunications will be addressing more large-scale and system-level issues.
