Projects

Amid global crises and declining influence in the global ICT market, Europe must act swiftly to secure technological sovereignty. The Celtic Next Flagship project SUSTAINET tackles this by focusing on resilient, energy-efficient, secure, and sustainable end-to-end networks. It emphasizes seamless digital system interconnection, ICT hardware/software innovation, and robust communication infrastructure — especially for critical services. With rising ICT reliance in areas like power management, future networks must support context-aware services and withstand failures and disasters. Sustainability is also central, as networks must adapt to renewable energy use and contribute to a carbon-neutral future. Achieving these goals demands coordinated R&D, industry collaboration, and strong government support to drive Europe’s digital and sustainable transformation.

The research project Realising Enabling Architectures and Solutions for Open Networks (REASON) aims to develop and demonstrate novel technologies and solutions for future open 6G communication networks targeting to alleviate current bottlenecks in delivering optimised end-to-end multi-technology, multi-vendor networks. The project focuses on all layers of the network, from technologies to systems to new AI-empowered software.

Connect the Unconnected - A feasibility study on connectivity in Nepal. As cities grow, existing cellular infrastructure struggles to meet the demand for reliable, high-throughput, and low-latency communication services. This project addresses the above challenges in a cost-effective and flexible way, investigating the feasibility of placing LTE Nomadic Nodes (NNs) at a scale in order to enhance network capacity and coverage.

The UCare project delivers an air quality and energy consumption monitoring framework for assisted living care homes. Based on the hardware and software components from the UMBRELLA ecosystem, a flexible and scalable solution was designed and developed that can assist caretakers with improving the health and quality of life of elders.

An ambitious programme geared to create a radically new architecture for the UK’s internet and telecommunications infrastructure. The project will deliver the next generation converged digital infrastructure for the UK. This will create an agile, resilient network capable of meeting the future needs of our rapidly changing society and ensure that the UK’s digital infrastructure continues to be world leading.

The BEACON-5G (Building REconfigurable, Agile, SeCure, and TrustwOrthy Systems for OpeNness in 5G) project contributes towards accelerating the development of 5G Open RAN solutions for urban requirements. It aims to develop an end-to-end high performance 5G system with native capabilities of openness, security, and trustworthiness, that can be rapidly reconfigured and optimised for operation in diverse industry-centric and consumer-centric applications in dense urban local/private as well as in public/carrier environments.

SYNERGIA will devise, develop and demonstrate a novel secure-by-design, endpoint-to-core IoT platform for large-scale networks of low-power resource-constrained devices. The platform will provide users with distributed processing capability at the Edge-as-a-service. Security issues will be addressed at all platform tiers, i.e., resource-constrained devices, Edge and backend.

The UMBRELLA project will create a universal IoT platform able to control different experimental testbeds and usecases in a secure manner. It will consist of 250+ multi-radio multi-sensor IoT nodes, deployed on public infrastructure and UWE's campus, that will provide access to cutting-edge radio and sensor solutions for research and business trials.

The CAVShield Feasibility Study addresses the urgent global need for robust methods and techniques around the identification and counteracting of cyber vulnerabilities in fleets of connected vehicles.

FLOURISH was a multi-sector collaboration that helped to advance the successful implementation of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) in the UK, in the UK, by developing services and capabilities that link user needs and system requirements, and maximising the benefits of CAVs for users and transport authorities.

Leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, industry expertise and world-class academic research, the £5million VENTURER research and development project has over the last three years established the West of England as a centre of excellence for the safe user-led trialling of connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology.