Nokia and Inria have signed a four-year collaboration agreement to "address key scientific challenges related to the development of networks and web applications.
The two companies are extending their collaboration for another four years as researchers collectively rack their brains trying to figure out what the future of networking will look like. The new collaborative lab will create 15 new PhD students and postdoctoral fellows jobs at Nokia Bell Labs and Inria, with a special focus on "intelligent networks and edge computing".
The collaboration between Nokia Bell Labs and Inria will focus on three things in particular - 6G-based distributed learning, artificial intelligence-based intelligent network management and network-aware industrial applications.
"The networks of the future will have to connect the digital world, the physical world and the human world to unleash the innate potential of humanity in the age of the metaverse," the press release states. What these companies seem to be saying is that they believe the network of the future will need to become flexible based on a wide range of customer needs - which is indisputable.
We're told that networks will also develop "enhanced sensing capabilities and enhanced contextual awareness in terms of user state and intent, dynamically and automatically adjusting connections to meet user needs." That sounds like dynamic bandwidth scaling, but we "believe there's more to it than just so many smart cookies taking the time to think about it.
Inria and Nokia Bell Labs have had a rich and productive relationship for more than 20 years," said Thierry Klein, president of Solutions Research at Nokia Bell Labs. "Inria is part of Bell Labs' Distinguished Academic Partner Program, which attracts the best and brightest minds from the world's leading universities and academic organizations to work with us to change the way humans live. This new phase of our collaboration addresses strategic challenges for the future of infrastructure and applications in a digitally connected world, and we are excited about the collaborative benefits this continued collaboration brings to Nokia, our industry and society to enable better experiences in a digital world."
Bruno Sportisse, CEO of Inria, added: "Nokia Bell Labs is one of our key strategic partners, and I am delighted that we are strengthening our partnership. For Inria, working with a world leader with a footprint like Nokia's across Europe is one of our priorities, whether it is to position us on major scientific themes, to maintain shared scientific and technical excellence, or to make an impact on the scale of our work. The gradual evolution of our partnership also demonstrates the importance of building long-term relationships based on trust in joint strategies and roadmaps. Together with Nokia, we will work on new areas of 6G mobile networks, which bring new technical and theoretical challenges that must be addressed together in software design and data exchange.
It is unclear what all of the above means and how well it syncs with the predictions of other future-focused scientists, but in summary, the release asserts that future networks will be 100% cloud-native and support distributed architectures, that they will have zero-touch management and orchestration through artificial intelligence, and that devices will rely on a combination of edge cloud and local proximal computing, resulting in massively distributed computing architectures.
All of this may be true, or the network of the future may take a different currently unarticulated form - time will tell, but what is certain is that the origins of the eventual whipping boy of the telecom/technology industry come from such theoretical conversations and research labs that it's worth looking at the big picture from time to time and paying attention to where the soothsayers think technology advances will take us to.
