Research ties make future bright

Olle Viktorsson, Director, External Research Relations, Ericsson Research, says: "It is essential to maintain a close collaboration with the best professors carrying out work of specific importance to us. We also come into contact with the best PhD students this way, since they tend to 'grow' around the finest teachers. This bodes well for the future in terms of attracting potential new blood to the company."

Other principal aims of these joint research projects include:

• producing useful hardware and software prototypes;
• providing an opportunity for experts to confer on industry pre-competitive and pre-standardization harmonization;
• promoting Ericsson as a long-term technology leader and an innovative company.

Ericsson has research branches and collaborations with universities in North and South America (US, Canada and Brazil), Europe (for example, Italy, Germany and Sweden) and Asia (China and Japan).

According to Viktorsson, one of the company's most fruitful collaborations has been with the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), where outstanding technical results have come out of 10 years of joint research based on two principal focus areas.

Firstly, the radio-access-related work carried out there is of great importance for the evolution of radio base stations. China is a huge market, and with its ambition to launch a 3G network, it is essential for Ericsson to have a good understanding of all activities related to this.

Viktorsson says: "We at Ericsson are looking for a way for China to migrate to the next generation of worldwide standards."

Secondly, BIT is an influential international test center for speech quality assessments. Extending the capability to perform video quality assessments is in the pipeline. And according to Viktorsson, media coding with the main focus on speech and audio is a further area of interest.

Ericsson also carries out valuable research into photonic networks and systems in cooperation with the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy - a project inherited from the Marconi acquisition. With optical access and network transport increasing in importance as a result of the convergence of fixed and mobile, Ericsson has a vested interest in further strengthening its technical leadership in this area.

There are three main ways of carrying out joint research:

• through a bilateral agreement between Ericsson and a university professor - Ericsson specifies the project, the deliverables and the way of working; 
• through a European Framework Program Project - consortia are built around one problem area;
• through research centers - typically these projects are started by a university, and receive industry and government funding.

Viktorsson says: "While the main task of Ericsson Research is to work on R&D, it is not only about delivering reports, prototypes and so on, it is about expansion (plans are afoot for the recruitment of a further 500 research engineers), the transfer of competence and knowledge, and securing the best possible talent for the future."