Real-time performance – Summer in the Labs

Students from many different fields join Ericsson Research for internships or thesis work. You could be next. Follow our blog to learn about the students at Ericsson Research this summer.

Hi Robert! What are your tasks at Ericsson Research?

In the end, it’s about ensuring high quality transmission for applications that require real time information exchange over LTE (4G) and future 5G. I will evaluate application performance with different routers and parameter settings under different circumstances; both in a laboratory setting and out in the field, and those test results will help towards the goal. Right now, this is done over LTE (4G), but I am also preparing for it to work for future 5G. The first part was to set up the real-time applications test suites, and as next stage, I will be testing them practically.

Name: Robert Hedman
Unit: Radio
Education: Engineering physics master of
science program at Luleå university of
technology
Location: Luleå
Age: 24

 Radio research

What part of Ericsson Research do you work in?

I work in research area Radio. Here, they do research into radio network solutions, radio access technologies, advanced antenna systems, propagation and wireless backhaul. The latest technologies are being invented here - Ericsson is at the cutting edge of both LTE, the technology used to deliver mobile broadband for 4G; and of New Radio (NR) radio access solutions for future 5G.

Engineering physics and robotics

What are you studying?

I have finished my third year of the Engineering Physics Master of Science program at Luleå University of Technology. I have a Bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics from Umeå University. After being accepted into the annual robotics competition at Umeå University – more on that later! - I realized that my passion is more with engineering than theory, so I switched track.

For my BSc thesis, I did some space science research, more specifically the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and the interplanetary magnetic field carried by the solar wind. This lead to some small new discoveries that allowed me to join an international research group in pursuing these findings.

My current degree is focused on robotics, electronics, control engineering, and automation.

Robotics

Robotics is a big interest of mine! The last few years I have been competing in robotics for my high school in Dallas and here in Sweden. This year me and team from Luleå University of Technology managed to win the competition!

This competition involved building a robot from scratch designed to fulfill a given task. This year the task was for the robot to stack a given number of cubes on top of each other as quickly as possible.

Open Stack and working in another country

Is this your first summer at Ericsson?

Last year I worked for Ericsson in Dallas, US, but it’s my first summer in Luleå, Sweden.

I’ve been to high school in Dallas and I have family there, so I wanted to experience what it’s like to work abroad.

In Dallas, I worked with documentation of engineers’ findings and personal experiences with OpenStack. OpenStack can be said to be the de facto open source cloud platform, and is used as the basis for many private and public cloud deployments around the globe.

What would you say is the difference between Ericsson in Dallas and in Luleå?

From my experience, the work climate is very different and I guess culture might play a part in that. In Dallas it was more of an open office environment where people would stop by to discuss ideas. In Sweden it is a bit different where they to a bigger degree would schedule meetings to discuss such ideas. It has been interesting to see two different ways of working.

Downhill biking

What do you do when you are not working or building robots?

I am an active person so usually I have things going on at all times. The robotics competitions I mentioned earlier have been quite time consuming. Outside university and work one of my biggest interests is downhill biking. I’m actually going away to bike for a few days right after finishing this blog post.

Facts about Luleå

• Residents: ~ 77 000
• Students at Luleå University of Technology: ~ 15 000
• Latitude/Longitude: N65°35'5,348", E22°9'24,129"
• Distance from the artic circle: 121 km
• Hours of daylight: December - 3h 7min, June - 23h 8min
• Record snowdepth: 113 cm
• 75% covered by woodland