Bell Labs has become the latest company to join the Technical University of Dresden’s 5G research project, focusing on wireless and network projects.
Alcatel Lucent’s research arm said its collaboration with 5G Lab Germany will initially concentrate on two areas. The first is how operators can use multiple device-to-radio connections to make communication more reliable. Bell Labs will look at how smartphone performance can improve if it is connected to multiple radios at the same time. It said the technology would be of most interest to the emergency services to safeguard communication.
Bell Labs will also work on new air interface proposals for 5G networks, ahead of the forthcoming standardisation process. Its researchers have developed Universal Filtered-Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (UF-OFDM) waveform. It said the waveform would reduce the complexity of 5G networks, along with dramatically increasing the number of users.
The university’s 5G lab was launched in September 2014 and has 20 professors and more than 500 scientists working on next generation projects. Vodafone already works with the lab on 5G research.
In addition to wireless and networks, the lab also works on tactile internet applications, silicon systems and mobile edge cloud.
Tod Sizer, Head of Wireless Research in Bell Labs, said: “Bell Labs is an industry leader in wireless innovation and research, and is working closely with customers, key government funded projects in Europe and with leading universities like TU Dresden to collectively define what 5G should and will be.
“Our history with TU Dresden goes even beyond the very early definition of 5G and now we are innovating together to enable low latency applications, higher capacity solutions, as well as support for both Massive MIMO and Massive numbers of connected machine devices.”