H2020 backs new air interface for 5G
A group of 16 leading players in the field of telecommunications are joining forces to advance the development of a new air interface below 6GHz for 5G networks.
The ‘Flexible Air Interface for Scalable Service Delivery within Wireless Communication Networks of the 5th Generation’, or FANTASTIC-5G project, is receiving €8m of funding from the European Commission through Horizon 2020. The venture will focus on boosting capacity, increasing flexibility and improving the energy efficiency of the next generation of mobile networks.
The project will run for two years and seeks to develop a new multiservice air interface that operates below 6GHz frequency for 5G networks. It is intended that the interface is highly flexible in order to support different types of data traffic; scalable, to assist an ever-growing number of networked devices; versatile, to back diverse device types and traffic/transmission characteristics; energy and resource efficient, to better use the available spectrum; and future-proofed, enabling easy upgrades to future software releases.
Speaking about the venture, Frank Schaich from Alcatel-Lucent´s Bell Labs, who is leading the FANTASTIC-5G project, said: “FANTASTIC-5G is of key importance, as the multiservice air interface concepts being developed in the project will be evaluated and validated by the partners. This helps to build up consensus and to facilitate the standardisation process of 5G.”
The project includes partners located across Europe, including Germany, France, Denmark, Italy and the UK. In addition to Alcatel-Lucent, members of the consortium include Orange, Telecom Italia, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Aalborg University, CEA-LETI and Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institut.
According to the partners, future mobile networks need to become even more flexible and efficient than 4G, 3G and 2G networks to cope with increasing demand.
