As the 5G ecosystem starts to take shape, research partnerships continue to be announced among mobile operators, testing companies and research institutions. The latest of those is Keysight Technologies‘ news this week that it has a memorandum of understanding with Korean operator KT to collaborate on “5G” development.
Hong-Beom Jeon, SVP of the infrastructure lab at KT’s Institute of Convergence Technology, said in a statement that “in particular, we’re expecting to reap successful results in the area of millimeter wave, one of the key enabling technologies of 5G for the transmission of wireless data through very wide bandwidth.”
Other announced 5G research partnerships include work being done at NYU Wireless, NTT DoCoMo’s vendor partnerships and Europe’s 5G Public-Private Partnership.
• IEEE said it successfully tested improved privacy features for Wi-Fi at field trials during conference events in late 2014 and the spring of this year.
IEEE’s 802 LAN committee and the Internet Engineering Task Force conducted the trials at IEEE and IETF events in Berlin, Dallas and Honolulu. Meeting attendees participated in the experiments that addressed “privacy risks associated with tracking globally unique media access control (MAC) addresses” in Wi-Fi networks, according to IEEE. The trials came out of an IEEE study group that aims to examine Wi-Fi privacy issues and develop recommended practices.
Juan Carlos Zuniga, who chairs the IEEE 802 Privacy Executive Committee Study Group and is a principal engineer at InterDigital, said in a statement that the mobile privacy trials “demonstrate that there are viable means for protecting users against privacy risks, and also set the stage for further study and collaboration to ensure the technical community prioritizes Internet privacy and security.”
“The ability of end users and organizations to protect the privacy of their presence and communications from passive observation is an important component of IETF and IEEE 802 efforts,” said Joel Jaeggli, operations and management area director for IETF. “Successful trials of MAC address privacy implementations helps address a key problem with the visibility of Layer-2 identifiers on shared local area networks.”
• Rohde & Schwarz is expanding its 40-year relationship with global distributors Avnet EMG GmbH and EBV Elektronik. The companies signed a new, “extensive” partnership agreement that “consolidates the current business and provides a legal platform to extend it further,” in the words of Peter Schlindwein, VP of corporate procurement at Rohde & Schwarz.
Miguel Fernandez, president of Avnet electronics marketing EMEA, said in a statement that the “new agreement now puts our collaboration on a new footing – an important step towards a genuine strategic partnership on equal terms.”
Rohde & Schwarz also continues to consolidate its brands. This week, the company’s deep packet inspection specialist company ipoque released its first product under the Rohde & Schwarz brand: the R&S Net Sensor, a network probe that provides traffic analysis based on IP application classification. Rohde said that the sensor “allows mobile and fixed network operators and service providers to extract meaningful network traffic information and subscriber behavior data, as well as identify statistical trends, either in real time or aggregated up to one year.”
Meanwhile, R&S said that it is in the process of the full integration of subsidiary Hameg Instruments into its larger test and measurement division, as a boost to R&S-branded lower-cost test instruments. Hameg equipment started appearing under the R&S brand in 2014, and that will continue as Rohde & Schwarz also takes over sales and service. Full integration is expected to take place over the coming year.
• JDSU’s Network Instruments launched a new appliance for retrospective network analysis on 10 Gb networks. The GigaStor Portable 10 Gb Wire Speed RNA device has 6 terabytes of raw storage capacity to record traffic and supports remote access to the device.
