InterDigital Shortlisted for Three Fierce Network Innovation Awards For Outstanding Research in AI, Mobile Wireless Evolution, and Sustainability

InterDigital has been named a finalist for the 2024 Fierce Network Innovation Awards, solidifying our position as a leader in technological innovation and impact in wireless communications. As a publication, Fierce Network covers AI, automation, fixed and mobile broadband, cloud infrastructure, application modernization, security, and more and the Fierce Network Innovation Awards celebrate transformative companies, solutions, and individuals with the potential to revolutionize networks, drive customer engagement, and deliver substantial savings and innovation.

This year, InterDigital was recognized for three Innovation Awards for AI, Sustainability, and Mobile-Wireless Evolution. The following blog introduces the InterDigital technologies and innovation impact being recognized for the Fierce Network Innovation Awards, which will be announced on December 19, 2024.

Finalist: AI

InterDigital's AI-Empowered Receiver Design for 6G Wireless Communications

Leading advancements in AI that transform industry capabilities, InterDigital's AI- native receiver design for future wireless communications was recognized for its ability to use the power of AI and machine learning (ML) to improve wireless communications, By integrating traditionally separate receiver function blocks into a single AI/ML-based block, InterDigital's innovation reveals the potential to leverage AI to address real-world challenges facing next-generation communication systems.

InterDigital's AI- native receiver design represents a paradigm shift in wireless communications, replacing multiple signal processing blocks with a single, integrated AI/ML solution trained to jointly perform channel estimation, equalization, and demodulation with improved performance and robustness. This joint approach seamlessly integrates and optimizes the functions, thereby delivering significant improvements in throughput performance and a substantial reduction in communication overhead when compared to conventional designs.

Our innovative approach improves throughput performance, enhances robustness to hardware and radio impairments, simplifies receiver design, and reduces overhead, making it an ideal solution for 6G applications. These advancements have been validated through extensive simulations and real-word experiments conducted in collaboration with Keysight.

Finalist: Sustainability

Over-the-Air Federated Learning for Energy-Efficient Wireless Intelligence

Recognizing importance of solutions that address environmental challenges and drive sustainable practices, InterDigital is selected for its research with the University of Texas at Austin that demonstrates over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL), a significant breakthrough approach that combines model updates directly over the air. This innovative method eliminates the need for separate uplink transmissions, drastically enhancing spectrum efficiency and reducing energy consumption.

The rise of federated learning (FL) stems from the growing demand for privacy-preserving and collaborative ML, where models are trained locally on user devices and periodically aggregated at a central server. While FL addresses data privacy concerns, the frequent model updates from large numbers of UEs strain the uplink capacity, generating significant AI-driven data traffic, high energy consumption, and challenges the sustainability of AI-powered wireless systems.

InterDigital's Over-the-Air Federated Learning for Energy-Efficient Wireless Intelligence prototype, demonstrated at the Brooklyn 6G Summit alongside UT-Austin, has achieved compelling results - the model achieved a 400% reduction in spectrum usage and energy consumption for two devices, and as the number of devices scales to 20, these gains expand significantly to a 70x reduction in spectrum usage and 7x reduction in energy consumption. By enabling simultaneous transmissions from multiple devices within a single uplink allocation, InterDigital's contributions to OTA-FL significantly accelerates model convergence, improves spectrum efficiency, and reduces energy consumption by delivering tangible cost savings while opening a new direction to realize greener, more sustainable network-assisted AI.

Finalist: Wireless - Mobile Evolution

InterDigital's 6G Sensing Solution

Highlighting innovations in mobile technology that enhance wireless connectivity and user experiences, InterDigital is recognized for research advancing Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), an early building block for 6G. InterDigital has been driving 6G ISAC research and innovation globally, evidenced by our leadership of the ETSI ISAC Industry Specification Group (ISG). In practice, ISAC equips base stations and user devices with sensing capabilities that enables radio signals to detect and make sense of the environment around it. This has the potential to turn every cell phone into a functional radar device, capable of mapping and detecting changes in the environment around it, and equipping networks with capabilities to monitor a wide range of objects and other factors in their environment to deliver better services and experiences.

ISAC can help deliver more realistic immersive media experiences for consumers by making the user device capable of sensing the environment to enable new services. These can include gesture and activity recognition or even environment reconstruction to add depth to a digital twin. In an enterprise context, ISAC can be applied to scenarios like environmental or health monitoring, intruder detection, remote operations and autonomous vehicles, and much more.

InterDigital's 6G ISAC solution, first showcased at MWC Barcelona, displayed a mobile network offering the ability to collect sensing data from a variety of sensors and produce results from it that were shared in real-time with applications running over the network. All the sensing information was processed in the network and exposed in real-time to an application in charge of remotely detecting objects, which enabled an autonomous vehicle to seamlessly navigate around obstacles within the factory. ISAC represents one of the clearest examples of the novel differences between 5G and 6G, so much so that the World Economic Forum has named ISAC a game changing technology. InterDigital's dedicated research and innovation contribute to ISAC's role as an important driver of wireless evolution.

The Fierce Network Innovation Award nominations reflect InterDigital's continued dedication to developing impactful technologies with industry partners and academia that address global challenges like sustainability while pushing the boundaries of wireless and AI innovation.

To learn more about the Fierce Network Innovation awards finalists, please click here.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.