TUDOR (Towards Ubiquitous 3D Open Resilient Network)

TUDOR (Towards Ubiquitous 3D Open Resilient Network) is an ambitious research project aiming to develop economically viable full geographic coverage and thereby eliminating the digital divide, unprecedented energy efficient open system and massively contribute to UK strategy of diversification of telecom vendors ecosystem. The plan is to contribute to future standards (5G, 5GAdvanced and 6G), generate essential IPs and contribute to skills enhancements.

Ensuring the future of the UK’s telecommunication network is secure, caters to all of society, boosts the economy and is highly energy efficient is the goal of a new international project led by the 5/6G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey. Surrey’s £12m funding is part of a £28m pot shared across three UK Universities, with the investment dedicated to bolstering the UK’s status as a global leader in telecoms research and development. TUDOR is part of the UK government’s strategy to reduce the UK’s resilience on a small number of suppliers to build and maintain telecoms networks.

The team will also focus on how new technologies could be used to enhance telecommunications infrastructure as 5G matures as well as understand how emerging intellectual property could contribute to global standards and skills generation in the UK. Crucially, It will help design and promote a more diverse telecoms market.

The TUDOR consortium brings together world-leading researchers from UK universities, innovative equipment vendors, major network operators and network/software and system integrators from both space and terrestrial sectors. All have extensive experience in delivering collaborative research in advanced wireless and networking technologies.

Satellite Applications Catapult is proud to be part of this multiskilled and international consortium and will contribute to the initial design of the 3D open space-terrestrial network architecture, also studying and testing the energy efficiency of 3D open-RAN. We will also participate in the investigation of traffic steering and customisation of ML for 3D RAN features, and the development of network function disaggregation and monitoring/control mechanisms. Finally, we will contribute to the semantic communications and sensing by performing a feasibility study on using a single waveform for joint communication and position sensing for mobile User Equipment (UE) (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous vehicles).