CELTIC, a program running telecommunications research projects, has selected the Ericsson-led Maderia project as one of six projects to be recognized for excellence.

Liam Fallon and Johan Nielsen, senior researchers at Ericsson Ireland and Sweden respectively, will travel to Helsinki, Finland for the award ceremony on February 27-28.

"I'm really pleased," says Fallon, whose team in Ireland led the project. "We worked on this project for more than three years so it's great to have our achievements recognized by an external body."

CELTIC is part of Eurescom, partially funded with public money and by major European telecommunications players. Ericsson Sweden is one of CELTIC's twelve core partners, and Ericsson country research teams have been involved in all six winning projects.

Madeira was officially launched in June 2004 to study new ways of doing network management. The project brought together academic and industry partners in order to develop alternatives to traditional, hierarchical network management models that are increasingly unable to deal with the explosion of network nodes.

"We built a prototype management system that uses peer-to-peer technology to enable the network to configure itself," explains Fallon. This technology is influencing Ericsson's approach to Self-Organizing Networks (SON).

Nielsen adds: "Working collaboratively in what we call 'pre-competitive research' gives us access to knowledge additional to our own as well as the opportunity to influence the direction of future technology."

Although Madeira finished in 2007, its work will continue through Magneto, a project starting later this year. This project will look at management of the "outer edge" domain - the point of attachment of home area networks and other restricted area networks to telecommunication infrastructure.