University Carlos III of Madrid joins 5TONIC lab

11 July 2016

5TONIC and IMDEA Networks Institute are pleased to announce that University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) has joined 5TONIC, the first laboratory of 5G excellence in Spain. Founded last autumn by experts from Telefonica and the research institute IMDEA Networks, 5TONIC exists as an open ecosystem for innovation and research based in Madrid, which also counts with Intel, Ericsson Spain and CommScope amongst its members.

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The 5TONIC laboratory further enhances its influential capacity as an innovation kernel in 5G networks with the additional membership of an academic institution. UC3M is one of the top universities in Spain and number one in Telematics Engineering, having also received Europe’s most prestigious engineering accreditation, the EUR-ACE label, to its study program on that area. The Madrid university has a well-established long-term scientific partnership with IMDEA Networks, involving stable research collaboration in join activities and projects, as well as an institutionalized alliance in the form of UC3M’s participation on the institute’s Board of Trustees.

With the incorporation of a university, 5TONIC lab comes full circle and gains the unique perspective on current and future technological trends that can only be provided by the interdisciplinary triad research-academia-industry. The combined know-how of all lab members contributes to bridge the gap between the theoretical elaboration and the practical implementation of scientific results, which shall enable 5TONIC to further the development of 5G technologies, creatively, in the right direction and with adequate impetus.

At this early stage, 5G application scenarios are still being defined, and lab work is required to outline the suitable infrastructure that will enable the rollout of 5G networks. 5TONIC exists for this purpose and will operate at least until the first 5G products are commercially viable, which is expected to happen approximately in 2020.

With the above goals in sight, 5TONIC facilitates the performance of field tests and demonstrations of all the technologies and equipment which will make up 5G communications, including its services and applications. 5TONIC is the first laboratory in Europe that is taking such investigative processes from an eminently practical perspective. The members can carry out viability tests of a specific technology, determining hidden deployment costs, and analyzing all aspects of the system as well as the complexity of all the different solutions. In this sense, the laboratory will empower various sector players interested in conducting realistic analysis of the technologies that could graduate to 5G, who are also keen to accelerate innovations needed in network architecture to enable cases of use and applications on multiple industrial sectors.

5G networks are the key to the age of “all-connected” that is right at hand. Even though 5G networks are still in an initial phase of development, the consensus of sector experts estimates that the next mobile generation will considerably improve latency, the transportation of volumes of data will be 1,000 times greater than currently, will allow for the increase of the number of devices simultaneously connected between 10 and 100 times, and increase the life span of batteries up to 10 times, among others advances. Cases of future use such as the remote control of robots or the interconnection of sensors, plus the demands of mobile clients of the futures, shall require super-fast and top quality connections with latency levels practically nil.

About UC3M:

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) is a public research university, which has the category of Campus of International Excellence since 2009. It has around 17,900 students and 1,900 professors of proven competence, and is renowned for its outstanding facilities to develop research. UC3M is among the best universities in Spain and is included in the last QS World University Rankings (2015) of the top 50 universities world-wide established within the last 50 years. Among all research groups in the UC3M, the NETCOM group focuses its research on 5G networks, novel network architectures & communication protocols, mobile and wireless networking, network security, traffic analysis, energy efficiency, social networking, multimedia networking and Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The NETCOM Group has participated, and in many cases also coordinated, more than 30 research projects funded by the European Union.