CONTINUING THE COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION
Remember the time before smartphones and ‘mobile solutions’, before all the talk of autonomous systems and the Internet of Things? Remember when there was no 2, 3 or 4G? Remember wires, everywhere.
"I remember when, perhaps twenty years ago, what we were doing here was seen as interesting but too expensive to develop." Reflects Mikael Skoglund, Head of the Department of Information Science and engineering and vice dean of the school of Electrical Engineering at KTH.
For the past twenty years both he and his colleague, Professor of Signal Processing and program director for the MSc program in Wireless Systems, Mats Bengtsson have been performing both theoretical as well as experimental research, using numerous tools from information, communication, and coding theory to signal processing, machine learning and statistical physics to further develop wireless networks.
Skoglund and Bengtsson along with colleagues and students have worked to develop a technology we have come to take for granted, a technology which becomes more reliable, trusted, able, efficient and capable with each new ‘generation’. By the time we arrived at ‘3G’ enabled mobile devices they had capabilities that made it possible for us to access everything, almost anywhere. The wireless networking capability gave birth to the “smartphone”. It was easy to play games, send videos and images. Microblogging and sharing numerous selfies had become part of our everyday lives. This was all made possible from rapid, constant data transfer.
The next leap in wireless technology, 4G, became known as ‘mobile broadband anywhere and everywhere’ and it changed the atomic unit of the web from images to videos. Skoglund and Bengtsson, as well as colleagues and students, were involved from the start and between 2000 and 2010 they worked on 4G development. Their work was given a boost when in 2004 the European Commission began the project Wireless World Initiative New Radio (WINNER) whose aim it was to define the fourth generation radio standard. WINNER united 4G industry and researchers from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. By 2010 4G was a reality and the European Commission decided to invest 18 million Euros in the further development of the technology. Overall, the years 2007-2013 saw the EU invest more than €700 million into research on future networks, half of which was allocated to wireless technologies contributing to the development of 4G and beyond 4G networks.
The work on 4G has been a resounding success. Aside from download and streaming speeds, it has been a success from a societal point of view. It has led to a decrease in the digital divide between urban and rural communities. Worldwide standardisation has meant the use of a single technology from across the world without changes between Europe the United States and Japan- areas which previously all operated on separate systems. The internet on our phones is now taken for granted, and mobile internet usage, in 2016, surpassed desktop usage for the first time. 80 percent of time spent on social media is
spent on mobile devices and social media itself has been supercharged from Snapchat stories to the 8bn video views on Facebook per day.
When asked about their role in the development of this disruptive and enabling technology Skoglund explains that it was, “Through our research, networking and working on the huge European projects that we contributed.”
Looking to the future we can glimpse just how the work done by Bengtsson, Skoglund and the EE School continues to have an impact. Both 4G and now 5G have been influenced not only by the work of Skoglund and Bengtsson but also by their former Phd students, now working with major telecommunication companies such as Ericsson and Huawei. Already in the early 2010’s Skoglund and Bengtsson were involved in the development of the new 5G technology. WINNER was soon followed by another European project, the Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society (METIS). METIS, a consortium of 29 partners focusing on developing a concept for 5G was coordinated by Ericsson whereas WINNER was led by Siemens. This time the technical objective was to develop a concept for the future mobile and wireless communications system that would support the connected information society.
“5G will be different again,” Says Skoglund. “If you browse the internet over the phone a two-second delay can be okay, but if you wish to control a robot over wireless or an autonomous car, the requirements on real-time and reliable communication are much tougher. 4G can’t deliver that.”
We should be in no doubt that 5G technology will be transformative. It will affect most industries, and will supercharge virtual and artificial reality. The Department of Information Science and Engineering has made its mark on the way in which we live our lives today and will continue to have an influence on how we will live them tomorrow.
This article was originally published in KTH a piece of history
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