The explosive growth in advanced telecommunication networks and multimedia services
in the last decade has offered exciting opportunities across a wide range of sectors,
including communications, education, entertainment, and health. These opportunities
have been successfully embraced within Europe and USA, and there is an increasing need to
provide similar opportunities for the rapidly expanding economy of India. However, given
India’s special requirements, this cannot easily be achieved by transference of existing
technical and engineering solutions, and a fundamental rethink is required to adapt or
develop novel solutions and provide for research, innovation and wealth creation opportunities
between UK and India.
The IU-ATC initiative is focused on promotion of the Digital Economy, a priority identified under the recent government Comprehensive Spending Review 2007 . For our purposes , the Digital Economy "aims to support research and skilled people to effect early adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by a variety of user sectors. Understanding and enabling the impact of information, better positions the UK and India to reap the economic and social benefits offered by emerging Telecommunications Engineering hardware and software together with fixed/wireless/mobile Broadband technologies for low cost sensor and user devices, and service delivery platforms. The challenges in exploiting the promise of the technological advances within NGNs, and achieving their potential performance, economic and social returns, require not only a thorough understanding of the lower layers of the communications networking stack but also a strong ability and interest in exploiting the core technologies for citizen-facing applications. This often implies an appreciation of business and government strategies in specific areas such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing and management and requires close collaboration between academia and industry to realise the full potential.”
Through the previous consortia workshops, supported by DST/ UKTI and EPSRC, we have identified the need for the joint research programme of IU-ATC to:- encourage international scientific excellence and competitive activities in cross-layer research;
- encourage and enable social and economic inclusion within India and UK, in both urban and rural areas;
- widen participation in e.government initiatives and applications to improve quality of life and ease of use;
- provide a platform for the design, deployment and testing of innovative solutions that utilise a mix of fixed and mobile wireless core technologies and systems;
- enable creation of hardware/software solutions at affordable price points for service providers and consumers;
- encourage further developments in common platforms for NGN service design and delivery in partnership with industry at regional, national and international scales;
- support delivery of solutions for e.Health, e.Education and e.Finance in rural and urban areas through low-cost and energy efficient/aware devices;
- provide postgraduate training opportunities for the next generation of research scientists to manage the deployment of infrastructure and systems and to enhance future research capability and competitiveness (c.f. NASSCOM policy).
The proposal is structured on ten integrated cross-layer Activity Themes. These inter-related themes were identified after detailed technical discussions at various consortium workshops to ensure our programme of joint research between UK and Indian scientists is internationally leading and competitive and will contribute to the further development and deployment of Next Generation Converged Networks in support of affordable applications. These themes build on the strengths of our consortium members and also provide the greatest opportunities for the scoping of technology demonstrators that will underpin the development of policies and initiatives for both rural and urban Digital Economy programmes in India and UK. Each theme has strategic relevance for the realisation of efficient, robust and secure systems and converged networks to enable applications and services supporting the Digital Economy.
The themes are clustered into three High Level Research Activity areas which each have a UK-India Chief Monitor:
- Next Generation Network Enabled Applications and Services
- Next Generation Converged Network Protocols and Systems
- Next Generation Wireless Communications and Mobility
Each of these High Level Research Activities contains a number of sub-themes which will conduct their own specific scientific research under the coordination of UK and India lead scientists and also key academic and industrial partners. These themes are not stand-alone, but rather we will encourage inter-theme exchange and sharing of deliverables in both ad-hoc and controlled fashions through an Integration Theme. The latter activity will ensure that the opportunities to access testbeds provided by academic partners and BT will be coordinated and managed to leverage best advantage for both the Theme group and the project as a whole. Beyond this current proposal, the IU-ATC will develop initiatives to attract funding from strategic industry partners and the UK and India governments to become an international Centre of Excellence in NGN/ICT Research and Technology Transfer covering all layers of the communications stack. In so doing, the IU-ATC will provide an internationally leading resource of expertise and infrastructure to develop, at low financial risk and exposure, the research capacity of indigenous Indian companies in the ICT Engineering and Software sector. IU-ATC will also play a leading role in establishing competitive technology and knowledge transfer between the UK and India in the NGN-ICT domain over the next 10 years.