By John Tanner
Ericsson announced on Friday it has signed long-term co-operation agreement with Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur) for joint research in tech areas including AI and edge compute to contribute to development of 6G.
Ericsson and IIT Kharagpur have signed two agreements that they say will allow researchers from both organizations to “push the boundaries of fundamental and applied research in the radio domain.”
Among the planned research initiatives, one will explore resource optimization, dynamic observability and sustainable distributed and edge computing technologies. Another highlighted initiative will explore causal AI methods for joint communication and sensing (JCAS), including RL-based beamforming.
Ericsson said that AI and compute research is instrumental to 6G, as compute offload needs to be managed dynamically at edge and the policies would primarily be driven by AI to help 6G networks run faster and more efficiently.
The co-op agreement with IIT Kharagpur comes several months after Ericsson set up an ‘India 6G’ research team in its R&D Center in Chennai to supplement its global efforts to develop 6G technologies.
IIT Kharagpur director Virendra Kumar Tewari said the collaboration with Ericsson furthers its commitment to making India a technological innovation hub.
“In the 6G era, IIT Kharagpur aims to contribute to radio access technology and network, core network, RF and device technologies, VLSI design, neuromorphic signal processing, services and applications,” he said in a statement. “The institute also looks forward to participate in telecommunications standardization process, developing test beds, prototype development and commercialization along with training and manpower development.”
India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been laying the groundwork for 6G development under the ‘Bharat 6G’ programme since 2021, with the aim of making sure India-specific requirements (summed up as affordability, sustainability and ubiquitous connectivity and intelligence) are included in the global IMT-2030 6G standard that eventually emerges from the International Telecommunication Union around 2030.
