Students and academia of the IITH are immersed in developing 5G cellular wireless communication technology, which would be on a par with global standards. The indigenous development of technology could be of immense value to India in view of the low cost of development coupled with high performance possibilities.
A team of about 20 students pursuing their B. Tech, M. Tech courses and Ph.D. from the Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EE) department are working on this project. However, it would take a few years to become a reality.
The proposed architecture for 5G is Cloud Radio Access Network (CRAN) under which a central cloud (server) would be established at a convenient location where it is easy to handle. It would be connected with large number of low-power Remote Radio Headends (RRHs) through fibre optics. These RRHs can be fitted at any place without much expenditure as it was expected to cost about Rs. 5,000 each and supposed to cover about 20 km distance. These RRHs are lost cost, low power consuming and offer high capacity.
This system offers convergence of cellular, WiFi, sensors, Machine to Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (inter communication and data transfer between embedded systems without human intervention – IoT) on single platform – cloud. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, has sanctioned Rs. 23 crore for the IIT-H towards this project.
Tejas Networks, a private firm working on communication systems, came forward to join hands with IITH to work on this project and supplied additional engineering resources for 4G/5G base station product. IITH would have the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) on the product while Tejas Networks would be allowed to use the technology under the transfer of technology (ToT) mode.
The engineers from Tejas Networks would be working with the IITH team to synchronise their products properly with new technology when it would be launched. The research activity is being headed by Dr. Kiran Kuchi, Associate Professor.
“This technology will offer lot of advantages like establishing communication networks in remote areas with less cost and accessing data very fast without a fraction of interruption. The wireless sensors that would be established under this system with easy to communicate can be crucial in developing smart cities. This will be much in use once the broadband optical fibre network was established both in rural and urban areas,” Dr. Kiran told The Hindu .
