Turku has the best research on wireless communications in Europe

The EU Horizon 2020 programme funds European research and innovation projects. Competitions are a new form of Horizon 2020 funding, and they aim at finding solutions to critical problems in society.

Frequencies are filling up – new technology is needed

TUAS and its partners won the competition with the title “Collaborative spectrum sharing”, which refers to utilizing multiple telecommunications systems on the same frequency band.

The prize is worth EUR 500,000 and it was awarded to the actors at the Second Global 5G Event, which took place in Rome on November 9. The prize shows that Turku has the best competence in research on radio technology and spectrum sharing in Europe.

“The need for this kind of research has arisen from the explosive growth in the use of mobile data. Because radio frequencies are full, new means are required to utilize this diminishing resource”, says Research Leader Jarkko Paavola from TUAS.

“The funding received through the prize provides us a novel opportunity to develop our activities and start marketing our competence on an international scale”, Paavola says.

An autonomous spectrum sharing system developed in Turku

TUAS has been involved in several Tekes projects (the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation), which have already earlier developed the laboratory testing and field measurement systems required by the research on wireless communications technologies. The solution nominated for the competition had to be tangible and its functionality had to be demonstrated.

“So far, spectrum sharing systems have been managed in a centralized manner. In Turku, however, we developed a distributed autonomous system which optimizes its own operation. We demonstrated the opera-tion of the system at TUAS’ radio laboratory with the so-called TVWS radio network, and built a separate control network to manage the radio network. The spectrum monitoring measurements were used to verify the functionality of the system", says Principal Lecturer Reijo Ekman.

Oliver Holland of King’s College London, who led the proposal, commented: “would particularly like to thank our partners Turku University of Applied Sciences for their remarkable and fundamental contributions towards the submission”.

The partners of TUAS in the project were King’s College London, who led the proposal, Queen Mary Uni-versity of London, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and Fairspectrum, a Finnish SME.

See the video Future of UHF, 1:21