The first leading R&D centre in Europe in the telecom sector, the R&D division of France Telecom (FT) is one of France Telecom's assets for its worldwide strategy of expansion and consolidation in all major markets of the telecom sector. With more than 3,000 engineers and researchers spread over 13 sites in Europe, North America and Asia, the R&D division of FT is implemented at international level that enables cooperation with influential industrial groups, the international scientific community and regulatory bodies. Responsible for the group's strategic targets and critical technical areas, the R&D division of FT aims to deliver the best innovations to the intra-group clients: 70% of the products and services marketed by the group are born in the labs of the R&D division of FT. To face the current technological challenges, it develops its expertise and technology in the following fields:

• New generation networking: definition of concepts and architectures enabling networks to evolve progressively toward high bit rate, multi-service, easily operated solutions;
• Multimedia services and technology; Mobile networks and services including GRPS, UMTS and Beyond 3G ;
• Innovative End user interfaces: Multimodal interfaces, natural languages processing, advanced interfaces;
• Software engineering systems: real-time kernels, distributed systems, embedded systems.

The R&D division of France Telecom has actively been contributing to numerous collaborative R&D actions, both at national and international level: RNRT (National Research Network in Telecommunications), IST projects (with more than 75 projects in FP5), EUREKA, etc. In addition, the R&D division of FT maintains a close relationship with public-sector laboratories, such as the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the INRIA and the CEA. On average, 60 research contracts on telecommunications and technology are signed every per year. The team that supports this proposal is currently involved in two IST projects: Diadem Firewall, dealing with security issues in the network, and Ambient Networks, dealing with the provision of a transparent service delivery to users. Finally, the team is involved in an RNRT project, Safari, dealing with ad hoc networks. FT  has been interested in PlanetLab activities for some time and is a corporate member of the PlanetLab consortium. The R&D division of FT hosts PlanetLab nodes in two research centres: two nodes in San Francisco and two nodes in Lannion.

Role in the OneLab project:

Within the first phase of the project (OneLab1), France Telecom was responisble for overseeing the new environments work package (WP4) and also for the ad hoc wireless software component.

Key staff:

• Dr Yvon Gourhant, Research Engineer
• Dr Djamal-Eddine Meddour, Research Engineer
• Bertrand Mathieu, Researcher