Brussels, 17/10/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 17 October, the European Commission and Japan unveiled four research projects developing new technologies for high-speed networks in highly-dense user areas. Joint investments amount to €12 million and more than 40 partners are involved. Researchers will notably deliver more than 1 Gigabit bandwidth for each member of the crowd at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, in time for the 2020 Olympics.
Fast mobile internet connections are needed because the growth of smart phones and tablets has dramatically increased mobile internet usage. At the same time people are increasingly using these devices for real-time video-streaming, which old networks can't cope with. The number of mobile broadband users is expected to reach 4 billion by 2017. Internet connections fail every day in many public areas of cities, such as in public transport, stadiums, shopping centres, conference centres, and concert halls.
Increasing the throughput of communications per user in such situations is difficult because of many restrictions relating to the conventional communication systems for densely located users. Network capacity needs to be expanded to ensure hitch-free connections. The EU and Japan will each invest €6 million of funding from the Horizon 2020 programme in the four projects: a) RAPID will use innovative radio network architectures to advance #5G technology; 2) iKaaS will develop a smart and secure platform for smart cities based on big data resources collected from the Internet of Things (#IoT) sensing environments such as mobile terminals, smart devices and smart homes; 3) SAFARI will develop programmable optical hardware for novel multi-flow transport functions scalable to at least 400Gbps/channel; 4) FESTIVAL will provide joint EU-Japan IoT experimentation platforms, where experimenters can validate their smart ICT service developments. (LC)