A consortium of nine U.K. institutions and seven Indian scientific institutions are all set to design the next generation of wireless systems across India.
The project, India-U.K. Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) of Excellence in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services, is being led by Gerard Parr from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and Ashok Jhunjhunwala at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras.
The lead U.K. institution is the University of Ulster and the other institutes from that country are: the University of Southampton, the University College London, the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), the University of Surrey, the Queen Mary University of London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Lancaster (U.K.) and the University of Bristol (U.K.). The lead Indian institution is the IIT-Madras. The others are the IITs in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kanpur; the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore; and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
ADVERTISEMENT
In an e-mail interview, Professor Parr noted, “There are a number of key challenges we must address from the engineering, research and socio-economic aspects of next generation wireless systems.”
He said: “Areas of importance relate to the performance and accuracy of the lower level physical communication channels, their robustness in the presence of failure or interference, how they cope with reduced power to provide for energy optimisation, enable secure transmission and provide adequate bandwidth and quality or service to support an array of services and citizen-facing applications, especially video-based content that might form part of an e-government application in a rural area.”
Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science Lajos Hanzo explained that the contract for the project would better position the U.K. and India to reap the economic and social benefits offered by emerging Telecommunications Engineering hardware and software together with fixed/wireless/mobile broadband technologies for low cost sensor and user devices, and service delivery platforms.
ADVERTISEMENT