Nokia, UTS open new research facility to push boundaries of 5G

The state-of-the-art 5G Futures Lab will power campus-wide 5G coverage, allowing for the development, testing and demonstration of potential 5G use cases in the lab and field as well, the company said in a press release on Monday.

Additionally, Nokia, UTS and their commercial partners will also use the lab to explore the capabilities of 5G Advance, an enhanced version of 5G, and candidate 6G technologies for Industry 4.0 applications such as industrial automation, smart agriculture, smart energy and human-robot interaction.

"We're excited about this partnership with UTS and what we can achieve together. Here at the 5G Futures Lab we can push the boundaries of 5G, developing new 5G use cases for industry and consumers as well as testing the latest innovative Nokia products for our customers," said Dr Robert Joyce, Chief Technology Officer at Nokia Oceania.

The lab is equipped with the latest 5G products from Nokia's AirScale radio portfolio and optical and IP technologies which will provide the high-speed connections between the Radio, Core and Edge nodes within the lab and across the wider UTS Tech Lab campus and support the development of 5G use cases for industry.

The 5G Futures Lab is also directly connected to UTS' large Antenna Chamber, where the Finnish firm can test the potential of its latest 5G radio technologies such as the Nokia 5G Smart Node.

The '5G Connected Cobot' project is the first of these joint Nokia UTS research collaborations wherein researchers will also explore how 5G and Edge Computing can be used to offload the processing power of a Collaborative Robot (Cobot) into the Nokia Edge Cloud. The Nokia-UTS joint project will demonstrate the power and cost savings to the Cobot operation through an extended battery life as well as access to a much more powerful processor at the Edge to enhance its capabilities.