On 15 November, the Federated Telecoms Hubs (FTH) invited academia and industry to a symposium in London.
It was an opportunity to hear from each of the four hubs that make up FTH and understand their ambitious collective goals to better drive the gap between telecoms R&D and translation to commercialisation.
Here, UKTIN shares its highlights.
Proceedings began with keynotes from Catherine Page OBE, Deputy Director, Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, and Glenn Goodall, Head of ICT Research Portfolio, UKRI EPSRC.
Page explained that DSIT intentionally defines future telecoms – the topic for the day – broadly to encompass all evolutions of the networks that carry data, including 6G, and the various technologies that will make up those networks.
“Telecoms is of foundational importance for the growth of the future economy”, Page remarked, going on to say that it is as essential as water.
So where does R&D fit into this? “Well this is where we know telecoms isn’t like water”, Page explained. “Because advancements and threats are emerging all the time. Being an early mover and seizing the opportunities while avoiding and mitigating the risks is key.”
It was observed that the discussions around 6G are already underway in standards bodies and the UK has been active in trying to make its voice heard internationally and advocating for priorities like interoperability and plugging the digital divide. “The technical blueprints are going to be set in industry led standards bodies. We need R&D underway in our universities and industry to feed into them.”
Goodall echoed much of Page’s sentiment, recognising – in a theme that was echoed throughout the symposium – that “telecoms is a collaborative community with a real passion”.
Introducing FTH
The Federated Telecoms Hubs – comprising CHEDDAR, HASC, TITAN and JOINER, were announced at MWC in February as part of the £70m Future Telecoms Mission Fund. While each hub is conducting and enabling world-leading research, FTH represents more than just the sum of its parts, instead it exists to be a catalyser of telecoms innovation, ensuring the UK can harness even greater value from its academic excellence.
In her keynote, Page identified four things she’s particularly excited to see emerging from FTH:
- Collaboration – it was noted that FTH has already brought together so many universities and are working closely as a network, looking to build synergies with groups working on other technologies such as the quantum hubs. Continuing this approach will avoid siloes and ensure FTH has even greater impact.
- Commercialisation – translating research is key. While the UK is a world leader at academic research, we increasingly fall away as businesses grow and scale. There is a strong desire therefore to see the fruits of the FTH research pulled through into the technologies that form our future networks.
- Skills – having the people who can develop, operate and innovate in telecoms is crucial to the UK as a country and Page expressed her hope that the hubs will play an important role not just in developing the next generation of technologies, but the next generation of engineers.
- Real-world benefits – the strong focus on how these advancements in technologies can deliver genuine impact, for instance by driving collaboration and innovation, achieving better energy efficiency, or delivering more resilient services. Integration of terrestrial and NTN for instance – can we deliver more resilient services?
Prof. Harald Hass then took to the stage to explain how at its core, FTH is about delivering impact. “Doing well in our research is not good enough for societal value”, he explained. “We want to do more and have established seven missions which go far beyond research and set out a ten-year vision”.
Hass went on to outline the governance structure, which is led by Hass and TITAN, sits above FTH which encompasses a CTO, standards director, skills and training director, and marketing director, all with a focus on in the short-term facilitating the transition of research from low TRLs to high TRLs, and in the longer-term, achieving those missions.
Hass then invited the other hub directors to the stage to provide an introduction into the research they’re conducting and enabling. Each of the hubs is focused on a different element of the telecoms ecosystem, coming together to represent the very best and brightest of UK telecoms R&D.
CHEDDAR - Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed Cloud Computing Applications and Research
Prof. Julie McCann, Imperial College London and Hub Director for CHEDDAR, explained that the hub is a cohesive research ecosystem, founded on the principles of co-creation, nurturing talent and sparking research adventure, to solve next generation communications problems.
Starting with a collaboration of five universities, the hub has already significantly grown in the 12 months it has been active, with a focus on three core themes:
- Emergent systems: exploring communications-based technology and research, compute infrastructure as it grows, and the demands it places on comms infrastructure
- Sustainability: exploring this in the broadest sense encompassing energy and materials but also viable alternatives to physical sensors i.e. extending joint sensing
- Human centric systems: bringing in people from outside telecoms to explore topics such as privacy, security, understandability and more
- HASC - the Hub for All Spectrum Connectivity
Prof. Dominic O’Brien, University of Oxford, introduced HASC as a collaborative endeavour between seven academic partners and 21 researchers, with further proposals being funded. It takes an overarching view of wired and wireless communications together, through the lens of spectrum.
As wireless is moving to higher frequencies with ever expanding trees of fibre with shorter wireless links, we need to consider wired and wireless together. This is exactly what HASC is doing, considering the evolution of both optical and wireless technologies and how they can be deployed to deliver benefits such as improved performance and reduced energy consumption.
The hub is focused on four core challenges:
- Modelling: to create a holistic picture of connectivity
- Connectivity: exploring how we can use the testbeds we have to demonstrate novel methods of connectivity
- Adaptivity: examining how we best use fibre and wireless together
- Security: with a particular focus on post quantum techniques
TITAN - the Platform for Driving the Ultimate Connectivity
Hass returned to the stage to introduce TITAN, which brings together 20 partner universities and four research institutions to realise a Network of Networks vision where we can connect and sense across terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.
The hub is focused around six lighthouse projects, with multiple mini projects in each:
- Network intelligence and end to end integration of different networks
- User-centre service-aware radio access control, integration and optimisation
- Optical wireless networks integration
- Fibre enabled connectivity integration
- NTN design and optimisation
- Quantum networks integration
With a focus on achieving end-to-end performance optimisation, quality, reliability, equality, Net Zero and positive socio-technical impacts, TITAN has a number of cross-cutting challenges which run throughout the hub based around performance, heterogeneity, resilience, security, trustworthiness, energy efficiency and ease of deployment.
JOINER - Joint Open Infrastructure for Networks Research
Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou introduced JOINER, the final hub which is building first-of-its-kind national experimentation platform which connected together research labs from 11 institutions across the UK who each bring a wealth of telecoms capability.
By federating those labs JOINER is enabling them to individually - and the UK collectively - to take those capabilities and the research they conduct, even further.
JOINER will be a multi-tenant, highly heterogenous environment, enabling users to test Proof of Concepts in as close to network operational conditions as you can get, immediately increasing and advancing the TRL of research prototypes.
Unlike the other hubs which are conducting research, JOINER is very much enabling research through it’s creation of a distributed lab environment that facilitates sharing of resources and co-development in a multidisciplinary research culture: from infrastructure to services to applications.
It was clear from the day that FTH is about so much more than just research – although as you’d expect from the universities represented, world-leading research is very much a core part of their purpose. In many ways, what FTH is facilitating is a fundamental and cultural shift in the way academics approach their research, with training workshops to upskill on commercialisation, and an IPR pool mechanism planned which will encourage researchers to think “patents before papers”, with funding to develop Proofs of Concept. It’s an exciting time to be in telecoms R&D as FTH bridges the gap between research and commercialisation.
