This open-access centre offers rapid, low-cost experimentation and testing for connected and autonomous vehicles. It provides researchers and industry partners with access to self-driving car prototypes, drones and certain types of ground robots. Its indoor experimental test bed is paired with state-of-the-art computing infrastructure for collecting vast amounts of data, along with powerful workstations for running advanced machine-learning models.

The Centre is not only located within one of Canada’s key clusters for connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) and next to Ottawa’s private test track, but also positioned to maximize innovation by bringing together experts from various fields, including social scientists, economists, ethics and compliance specialists and decision-makers, alongside engineers and computer scientists.

The Smart Connected Vehicles Innovation Centre is home to the Training and Research in Autonomous Vehicles for Reliable Services in the Air and on Land (TRAVERSAL) program.

The TRAVERSAL program is a collaborative effort between four Canadian universities that aims to train highly qualified personnel in fields related to autonomous technologies. 

The program gives participants opportunities to develop hard and soft skills, and offers industrial internships to bridge skill shortages in Canada’s connected and autonomous vehicles workforce.

TRAVERSAL is supported by a Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) grant, a large-scale training grant awarded by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

TRAVERSAL program announcement

The team behind the Smart Connected Vehicles Innovation Centre (SCVIC) is already leading the research in their field.

Technical Achievement Award from IEEE Communications Software Technical Committee (awarded to Professor Burak Kantarci)
Professor Burak Kantarci has received the Technical Achievement Award from IEEE Communications Software Technical Committee for contributions to AI/ML-enabled communication network security and trustworthy sensing systems for the Internet of Things.

Best Paper Award, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communication
A paper entitled “RL meets Multi-Link Operation in IEEE 802.11be: Multi-Headed Recurrent Soft-Actor Critic-based Traffic Allocation” (P. E. Itturria Rivera, M. Chenier, B. Herscovici, B. Kantarci, M. Erol-Kantarci), written in partnership with NEtExperience, won best paper at a flagship event of the IEEE Communication Society.

Best Student Paper Award, 2023 IEEE Virtual Communications Conference
A paper by A. Omara, B. Kantarci, entitled “Generative Adversarial Networks to Secure Vehicle-to-Microgrid Services,” won this award

Best Paper Award, 2022 World Wireless Research Forum
In 2022, the Smart Connected Vehicle Innovation Centre’s work, entitled “On the Impact of CDL and TDL Augmentation for RF Fingerprinting under Impaired Channels”, won best paper at the 48th Wireless Research Forum. The paper was written in collaboration with thinkRF, a company based in Kanata North.

Best Paper Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] GlobeCom 2021 Communication QoS, Reliability and Modeling Symposium
During the SCVIC’s first year, Professor Burak Kantarci and his team won the prestigious Best Paper Award from the IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom), which is a flagship conference of IEEE Communications Society. Professor Kantarci’s team presented their research at the symposium held in Spain, and the award was announced on December 8, 2021. This award underscores the intellectual merits, technical strengths and quality of the work being done at the lab. The project is realized in collaboration with Ciena, a lab partner, and funded by the OCI 5G ENCQOR program.

All Predict Wisest Decides: A Novel Ensemble Method to Detect Intrusive Traffic in IoT Networks

Minister’s Award of Excellence in the category of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (awarded to Professor Burak Kantarci)
In 2020-2021, Professor Kantarci collaborated with several major companies and secured investments to build the first ever university research lab in the Kanata North Technology Park.