4G on the horizon

UK and Chinese universities have united to produce the next generation in mobile technology.

A science bridges award linking UK universities and Chinese universities and institutions, led by Heriot-Watt, is to work on new developments in high-speed, secure wireless multimedia connections.

The UK-Chinese consortium consists of 17 academic institutions – ten from the UK and seven from China as well as 18 other industrial partners lead by Mobile VCE, a UK based mobile research company.

Working together the group intend to research and produce the successor to the current 3G generation of mobile communication: 4G. But what exactly constitutes this 4G technology is, as yet, unclear – though this is expected to be clarified by the end of the year.

Head of the project at Heriot-Watt, Dr Cheng-Xiang Wang, lecturer at the School of Engineering & Physical Sciences told The Journal: “In general, the term 4G means a next generation wireless mobile communication technology that can offer much better performance than the current third generation (3G) technology.”

Future users of 4G could expect to experience a substantial increase in mobile broadband connection speeds, even when moving at high speeds, while travelling by car or train for example - known as high mobility.

“It is expected that a 4G mobile broadband network will support data rates of up to about 100 Mbps for high mobility such as mobile access and up to about 1Gpbs for low mobility such as nomadic/local wireless access,” said Dr Wang.

This UK-Chinese alliance stems from already established research collaborations between some key partners of the consortium.

The importance of effective collaborations between the UK and China in 4G-technology development and research is “crucial and timely” according to Dr Wang: “China is an ambitious and increasingly significant country in wireless communications, having the world’s largest mobile subscriber population. This huge potential market offers China tremendous opportunity to influence the international standardisation processes for 3G and 4G systems.”

Funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK), the £1.1m UK-China science bridges project has three major aims: to enable the UK universities involved to become fully connected with top universities and telecom companies in China, to build on the existing substantive collaboration, and to ultimately create a UK-China joint R&D centre for 4G wireless mobile communications.

In addition, Dr Wang expressed his own future aims for the project: “My long-term goal is to use this three-year science bridges project as a stepping stone to further identify new collaboration/commercialisation opportunities, attract more funding from government and industries, and support long-term sustainable development of the UK-China R&D centre beyond the project period.”