InterDigital said the partnership will aim to develop critical 6G technology features including integrated sensing, communications and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
U.S. company InterDigital signed a research partnership with the 6G Innovation Center (6GIC) at the University of Surrey, in the U.K., to develop 6G enabling technologies that may impact future wireless standards, InterDigital said in a release.
“Innovation is at the core of our DNA, and this great opportunity to collaborate with InterDigital will allow us to ideate and develop critical 6G technology features including integrated sensing, communications and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces,” said Rahim Tafazolli Freng, founding director of the 6G Innovation Center at the University of Surrey.
The University of Surrey’s 6GIC was launched in 2020 as a global research hub dedicated to advanced telecommunications engineering. The 6G partnership will support joint dissemination of research findings in pre-standards and research forums such as ETSI, Innovate UK, and Horizon Europe partnership projects and in top-tier peer review journals.
Milind Kulkarni, VP and head of wireless labs at InterDigital, said: “Our new partnership with 6GIC reflects InterDigital’s commitment to collaborate with leading universities and programs to encourage innovative research outcomes and bolster the impact of our innovation through wireless standards like ETSI and 3GPP. Research collaborations like this both support U.K. strategies to promote wireless innovation through standard essential patents and leverages our unique expertise in areas like RIS and sensing and communications to drive the potential for 6G forward.”
In November 2022, InterDigital announced that it has been awarded funding to support five Horizon Europe 6G Flagship research projects.
Specifically, the five flagship projects include 6G-XR, CENTRIC, PREDICT-6G, 6G-BRICKS, and 6G-SHINE, which aim to enable technology advancement and experimental infrastructures for future 6G systems.
The projects awarded to InterDigital are aimed at exploring novel technologies and system architectures to be adopted in commercial networks in the medium or long term, as well as developing EU-wide experimentation platforms that can serve as a sandbox to validate technical 6G enablers.
The CENTRIC project targets the development of radio access technologies towards fulfilling the ultimate vision of a 6G user centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) native air interface.
Meanwhile, the PREDICT-6G project focuses on laying the foundations of an AI-powered digital twin framework to predict the behavior of the end-to-end 6G network and using this framework to enhance the reliability and time sensitivity of the network.
InterDigital also explained that the 6G-SHINE project focuses on the design of short-range communication protocols that can meet the extreme bandwidth, latency and energy requirements emerging for 6G, while the 6G-XR project targets the development of an experimental research infrastructure to evaluate and validate the performance of key 6G candidate technologies, components, and architectures, with focus on enabling next generation Extended Reality (XR) services.
Finally, the 6G-BRICKS project focuses on setting up an experimental research facility to evaluate two key 6G candidate technologies, namely Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) and cell-free massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO).
