Hudds leads €500k international project to look beyond 5G comms

A PARTNERSHIP of 11 universities and five telecoms companies across Europe, the USA and Brazil has been awarded almost half a million euros to research post-5G wireless communication networks.  At the heart of the project is the sole UK participant, the University of Huddersfield.

Pavlos Lazaridis, who is Huddersfield’s Professor in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, played a key role in drafting proposals for RECOMBINE (standing for Research Collaboration and Mobility for Beyond 5G Future Wireless Networks).  The aim is for experts in academia and industry to pay extended research visits to partner institutions and firms, sharing and boosting their knowledge.

The goal is to collaborate on designs for Future Communications Networks that can support multiple technologies and process information from a huge variety of sources, but remain highly resilient to security threats.

Among the partners in RECOMBINE are universities in Denmark, Greece and Bulgaria plus four leading U.S. institutions, including Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Federal University of Campina Grande in Brazil.  In addition, there are multi-national tech companies based in Spain, Denmark, Greece and Bulgaria.

The proposal, drafted by Professor Lazaridis, was submitted to the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme.  The 48-month project – due to begin this month with a launch event in Brussels – was awarded 478,400 euros, with more than a quarter of the funding being allocated to the University of Huddersfield.

“The RECOMBINE multi-national project will complement an existing four-year Horizon 2020 programme named MOTOR5G, which got underway in November 2019.  MOTOR5G will train the next generation of experts in communications networks.”

Said Professor Lazaridis, who is spearheading both 5G projects

Professor Lazaridis is RECOMBINE’s Principal Investigator and he will work closely with Huddersfield colleagues Professor Grigoris Antoniou of the Department of Computing Science, Reader in High Performance Computing Dr Violeta Holmes and Senior Lecturer in Electronic Engineering Dr Qasim Ahmed.

The University of Huddersfield – allotted 1,212,690 of the 3,979,000 euros awarded to the project – is providing supervision and a research base for four fully-funded doctoral students.