DISCO (DIStributed COmmunication Systems) is a Research Project funded within the framework of the THALES Program aiming at the “Reinforcement of the interdisciplinary and/or inter-institutional research and innovation with the possibility of attracting high standard researchers from abroad through the implementation of basic and applied excellence research”.

DISCO (Κατανεμημένες ασύρματες ΕΠΙΚοινωνίες - KEΠΙΚ in Greek) is co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF). The project started on January 2, 2012. The completion date is November 30, 2015.

The partners involved in DISCO are The Technical University of Crete (coordinator), the Athens University of Economics and Business and The University of Patras.

The aim of the project is to bring together members of the faculty of the three Greek universities, two invited accomplished researchers and a group of external collaborators. Our intent is to form a team that is active in diverse research areas of high promise that are related to wireless communications systems, will be capable to adopt a more holistic view of the design of distributed communications systems, and will have the capability to produce novel and forward-looking results.

At the end of the project we expect to be able to propose techniques and system architectures for the practical implementation of distributed/cooperative localization, cooperative compression, and PHY-security, with direct application to emergency radio and sensor networks. We also expect to form algorithms that can provide good performance, accommodate fairness and other quality-of-service (QoS) requests, and use the available resources efficiently. Certainly, we will contribute to the improved understanding of the behavior of communication networks with distributed nodes via theoretical study in both the communication and the mathematics disciplines. By avoiding and/or aligning interference, providing distributed and robust power control and access algorithms and by introducing improved routing and load balancing protocols, in addition to helping advance theory, we expect to contribute to improving the achievable data rates and increasing the number of users that can communicate simultaneously in a distributed wireless communication system.