G S Sanyal telecom school identifies new research areas for Vodafone

G S Sanyal School of Telecommunications, IIT Kharagpur, which recently partnered with Vodafone to set up Vodafone Essar-IIT Center of Excellence in Telecommunication, on institute campus, has received Rs 12 crore from the company for five years to carry out research projects of relevance to Vodafone.

Speaking to Business Standard, R V Raja Kumar, in charge of Vodafone-Essar IIT Centre, said, "We are going to start a technology incubation centre where the project staff, students and faculty can research together. Also, a part of the money will be used to fund some of the students' projects in terms of equipment cost, travel grants, and others."

"Our current areas of research include energising ICT for rural areas, how to bring wireless internet into mobile personal devices, communication technologies for future cellular and wireless systems, and new services," Kumar added.

"We had recently submitted several research proposals to Vodafone of which eight have been identified as high priority areas. Of these, one of the research areas will be to collaborate with Vodafone for research on low-energy consuming future cellular systems. The research areas are in collaboration with Vodafone's global R&D teams," Kumar said.

For the eight projects, G S Sanyal School will recruit close to 30 research staff and 20 more IIT faculty. Currently, around 40 people are working on respective projects.

Among other developments, G S Sanyal School has received grant of Rs 1 crore from Santech Communication in Kolkata to develop a switch with convergent characteristics.

According to Saswat Chakrabarti, chairman of G S Sanyal School, research is on interconnecting users through the switch where a subsequent billing system would be in charge of consumer records and billing. This demands the signaling network of different protocols, like SIP, H.323, Q.931, Q.2931, ISUP, and others, used by different networks like IP, ATM, PSTN, for successful transmission of media between the users, and building up a billing mechanism compatible with the existing architecture.

Other recently completed research projects of G S Sanyal School include revival strategy for Hindustan Cables for Rs 39 lakh sponsored by the ministry of heavy industries, government of India; design and development of a vocoder for Rs 9.4 lakh sponsored by DEAL, Dehradun; design and development of turbo convolutional and product codes for Rs 9.2 lakh sponsored by DEAL, Dehradun; and a technical study of Hindustan Cables for Rs 8 lakh sponsored by Hindustan Cables.