on 04-04-2022
NetWorld2020, currently the NetWorld Europe, coordinates inside Europe industrial research and development on future communications, with the ambition of sustaining European leadership in mobile communications.
The Steering Board includes manufacturers such as Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, and Thales Alenia Space, operators such as Telefonica, France Telecom, and Telenor, and research institutions where IT is included, and its actions cover aspects as research topics, interrelation with vertical industries, promoting research in SMEs, and interconnecting with other communities (such as satellite, software or IoT).
After this nomination, IT has been designated in 2016 as Chair of the Steering Board and has seen its mandate renewed in later years. This has been a major event, with an academic leading for the first time the ETP.
Anchored in this context, IT moved to lead a large set of initiatives to structure European Research and led the change of the ETP into a new format, Networld Europe, and higher involvement with standardization bodies (like ETSI and CCSA), and vertical efforts.
A set of international events, the Visions for Future Communication Summit, has been developed, where European researchers share ideas about future topics. These ideas have been expanded formally into a Scientific Research and Innovation Agenda, representing the ideas and priorities inside Europe.
As a corollary to all this international work, IT has been actively involved in the small group writing the work program of the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaken (a cooperation between the community and the European Commission), setting the research priorities inside Europe.
Rui Aguiar (IT Aveiro)
on 04-04-2022
Europe's demand for high-speed broadband bandwidth has literally reached outer space. Direct broadcast, broadband multi-media, and broadband internet access requirements are driving the development of next-generation telecom satellites and are expected to be a key revenue generator.
In this context telecom satellites have entered the "multi-beam - multi-gigabit era"; satellites employ multiple beams to provide high-speed connectivity and broad coverage. Operators are pushing for a 10-fold increase in terms of broadband capability but the weight, size, and power limitations are severe bottlenecks to further increases.
It is evident that a change in technology both in terms of payload architecture and beamforming realization is necessary and the turn towards photonic technology is inevitable, showing an excellent potential to accommodate efficiently the increased capacity requirements of telecom payloads and at the same time reduce the satellite power consumption, weight and launch cost.
Within the scope of the EU project BEACON, IT was able to demonstrate the first-ever real-time photonic beamformer for processing 4 input Ka-band signals (1Gbit/s QPSK at 28GHz carrier), including an array of modulators, a multi-core optical fiber amplifier, and a silicon photonic integrated beamformer. The photonic processor developed allowed a size reduction by a factor of 5000 compared to other traditional approaches.
Rogério Nogueira (IT Aveiro)