Future of Telecoms: FTH Symposium Insights

On 15 November 2024, TITAN co-hosted a symposium with the Federated Telecoms Hubs (FTH) in London, bringing together academia and industry to discuss the future of telecoms R&D and commercialisation.

Proceedings began with keynote speeches from Catherine Page OBE, Deputy Director of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and Glenn Goodall, Head of the Information Communications Technology (ICT) Research Portfolio at UKRI EPSRC.

Page remarked that “telecoms is of foundational importance for the growth of the future economy”, saying that being an early mover and seizing the opportunities while avoiding and mitigating risks was key. She 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,” she said.

Key areas for the FTH

In her keynote, Page identified four things she’s particularly excited to see emerging from the FTH:

1. Collaboration – it was noted that FTH has already brought together so many universities and is 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 an even greater impact.
2. Commercialisation – translating research is key. While the UK is a world leader in academic research, it increasingly falls 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?

Delivering impact

The hub director of TITAN, Prof. Harald Haas from the University of Cambridge, 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”.

Haas outlined the matrix governance structure of the FTH with TITAN, led by the University of Cambridge, acting as the conduit. The TITAN Leadership team comprising a CTO, standards director, skills and training director, and marketing director will form the Federated Hubs governance board alongside the hub directors, EPSRC and DSIT representatives. The focus of the governance board in the short term is to facilitate the transition of research from low TRLs to high TRLs, and in the longer term, to achieve the objectives laid out by the management boards.

The four directors introduced the research of their hubs. 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.

TITAN – the Platform for Driving the Ultimate Connectivity

Haas introduced 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 on six lighthouse projects, with multiple mini-projects in each:

1. Network intelligence and end-to-end integration of different networks
2. User-centre service-aware radio access control, integration and optimisation
3. Optical wireless network integration
4. Fibre-enabled connectivity integration
5. NTN design and optimisation
6. 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 several cross-cutting challenges that run throughout the hub based on performance, heterogeneity, resilience, security, trustworthiness, energy efficiency and ease of deployment.

CHEDDAR – Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed Cloud Computing Applications and Research

Prof. Julie McCann from Imperial College London — the 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:

1. Emergent systems: exploring communications-based technology and research, compute infrastructure as it grows, and the demands it places on comms infrastructure
2. Sustainability: exploring this in the broadest sense encompassing energy and materials but also viable alternatives to physical sensors i.e. extending joint sensing
3. 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

University of Oxford professor Dominic O’Brien 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:

1. Modelling: to create a holistic picture of connectivity
2. Connectivity: exploring how we can use the testbeds we have to demonstrate novel methods of connectivity
3. Adaptivity: examining how we best use fibre and wireless together
4. Security: with a particular focus on post-quantum techniques

JOINER – Joint Open Infrastructure for Networks Research

Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou from the University of Bristol introduced JOINER, the final hub which is building a first-of-its-kind national experimentation platform connecting research labs from 11 institutions across the UK each bringing 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 is a multi-tenant, highly heterogeneous 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.

JOINER enables research through a distributed lab environment that facilitates the sharing of resources and co-development in a multidisciplinary research culture: from infrastructure to services to applications.

It was clear that FTH is about more than just research, it is facilitating a fundamental and cultural shift in the way academics approach their research. With training workshops to upskill on commercialisation and an IPR pool mechanism that will encourage researchers to think “patents before papers” and funding to develop Proofs of Concept, it is an exciting time to be in telecoms R&D as FTH bridges the gap between research and commercialisation.

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this article, please contact titan-enquiries@eng.cam.ac.uk.