Kick-off for the Wireless World Initiative research

WWI contains a series of large Integrated Projects in the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) Information Society Technology with the overall objective to define systems and functions that provide the users with the best possible user experience while maintaining the lowest possible cost of purchase, use and ownership of the systems.

For WWI, the driving force is user-centricity. In addition to the technical viability, the future wireless communication systems providing seamless access to electronic services, applications and information anywhere and anytime will give added value to the users and service providers.

This user-centricity means that the users' needs, expectations and requirements will be considered and supported by all system levels from access methods and networks to service platforms and applications.

WWI - the Wireless World Initiative
The Wireless World Initiative was established in 2002 to prepare several coordinated FP6 proposals to cover a broad range of research topics for the development of wireless communication technologies for systems beyond 3G, including services and applications, platforms, networking, new radio interfaces and end-to-end reconfigurability. Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Siemens have been coordinating the preparation of these proposals.

The Initiative is made up of more than 100 partners. The majority of the global players in wireless communications from the manufacturers, operators, academic and national regulatory agencies domain as well as SME's participate in this initiative. The participants represent almost every European Union Member State, as well as Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Norway, Poland, Singapore and Switzerland.

Information Society Technologies (IST) in EU's 6th Framework Programme (FP6)
The focus of FP6's IST part is on the future generation of technologies, in which computers and networks will be integrated into the everyday environment, rendering accessible a multitude of services and applications through easy-to-use human interfaces.

This vision of "ambient intelligence" places the user at the centre of future developments. This research effort aims to bring IST applications and services to everyone, every home and to all businesses.

WWI Integrated Projects within FP6
The Integrated Projects are structured according to a layered model with radio, networking, platforms and application and reconfigurability, providing a complete set of functionalities. These projects are self-contained in each area of research, but complementing each other.

To ensure overall consistency of the expected results within this Initiative, Elisa corporation, France Telecom R&D, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica and Vodafone on behalf of the participating operators are working together with the project coordinators in orchestrating a complete system view and emphasising research issues that are common to all projects such as system architecture, user requirements, quality of service, security, resilience, reconfigurability, operability and validation.

A major objective beyond research is to enable a consensus building process already in the research phase to ease future standardisation. The challenge is to provide technically and commercially viable solutions with a strong user-centric approach.

The collective research efforts amount to several hundreds of person-years yearly and are planned for six years with three phases in mind, each lasting two years. Phase one will concentrate on exploratory research, identifying key technologies and requirements.

Phase two will deal with technology development and detailed systems definitions, and phase three with systems synthesis and demonstrations. An essential part of the activity will be dissemination of results and contribution to standards and regulatory bodies. The group of projects reflects the largest European collaborative research effort to date in the domain of wireless communications.

As part of phase one, the first WWI projects - three large Integrated Projects in FP6 - Ambient Networks (coordinator Ericsson) dealing with networking, WINNER (coordinator Siemens) dealing with new radio interfaces and E2R (coordinator Motorola) dealing with end-to-end reconfigurability were launched on January 1, 2004. Projects in other research areas will be launched later.