January 21, 2015 / Patents, CES / Posted By: Meghan Carney

Earlier this month at CES, InterDigital’s Bill Merritt participated in a panel discussion on patent reform, joined by executives from NewEgg, Qualcomm, and Cobra Technologies, as part of the 2015 Innovation Policy Summit.  We invite you to learn more about the issues surrounding patent reform by watching the entire discussion. You can also find a recap of the event here.

January 8, 2015 / IAM, IP, Intellectual Property / Posted By: Meghan Carney

This week, as part of a 2014 year-end wrap up, Intellectual Asset Magazine (IAM) released The IAM IP Personalities of 2014.  Included on the list is InterDigital’s CEO, Bill Merritt.  IAM’s Joff Wild and Richard Lloyd cite Bill’s leadership in 2014, a year when InterDigital announced a licensing agreement with Samsung and doubled its quarterly divended, as the reason for his inclusion.  Lloyd says about the selection, “Under Merritt’s steady leadership the company has shown that a large PIPCO backed by its own R&D can not only survive but also thrive in this market.”

Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) is a unique publication which focuses on the many ways in which intellectual property can be used to create corporate value. To view part one of IAM’s IP Personalities of 2014 list, click here.  

January 7, 2015 / 5G, Wi-Fi, InformationWeek, EE Times / Posted By: Meghan Carney

InterDigital engineers are hard at work paving the way for the next generation of technology.  Two examples can be found in recent articles published in InformationWeek and EE Times, both focused on 5G technology.

In an article published last week in EE Times, WiFi Preps for 5G, IoT roles,  InterDigital’s Monisha Ghosh and Robert DiFazio discuss InterDigital Labs’ initiatives to advance WiFi technology.  As part of the NG60 study group, Ghosh and DiFazio are working with other engineers to develop technology that will support enhanced versions of WiFi running from 900 MHz to 60GHz.  Monisha explains that gaining another 7 GHz would be a “huge boon for WiFi.” Also mentioned in the article are efforts by InterDigital engineers to create a prototype of a 60 GHz directional mesh architecture using electronically steered phased array antennas that could support up to five hops.  Click here to read the full article and see what else the NG60 study group is working on.

Also published last week was an InformationWeek interview with InterDigital’s Alan Carlton, Senior Director of Technology, which focuses on the expected capabilities of 5G technology.  Alan is the head of the InterDigital Europe office, which is one of InterDigital’s main offices for 5G research.  He explains that while 4G was all about enhancing video capabilities, 5G will be about touch technology, leading the way for “the tactile internet.” Click here to read the article and learn more about what 5G technologies have in store for us.

Want to learn more about InterDigital’s work with 5G technologies?  Visit the InterDigital Vault; it’s full of information on hot topics like 5G and the Internet of Things.

August 29, 2014 / JCT-VC, SHVC, HEVC, Video / Posted By: Meghan Carney

Recently in July, at the 18th JCT-VC meeting, the 9th JCT-3V meeting, the 109th MPEG meeting, and the ITU-T SG16 meeting, the 2nd edition of the HEVC standard was completed.  This 2nd edition has been approved by ITU-T, and is currently under ballot in ISO/IEC.

This is a significant milestone for InterDigital and other companies working to advance video coding technology.  There are two important extensions included in this 2nd edition.  The first is SHVC, which is the scalability extension of HEVC and adds support for embedded bitstream scalability. The second extension, known as MV-HEVC, will provide more efficient video capabilities for 3D stereoscopic and autostereoscopic video tools through the multiview extensions of HEVC.  To learn more about these advancements, click here to visit the MPEG meeting 109 webpage.

InterDigital has been a significant contributor to the HEVC standard, specifically in regards to SHVC.  Our engineers answered the SHVC call for proposals with a unique framework known as the “Reference Index Based Framework”, which is now a fundamental part of SHVC.

To read more on InterDigital’s work in the advancement of video coding technologies, check out the InterDigital Vault. It has whitepapers, presentations, and videos related to HEVC as well as other hot topics.

August 27, 2014 / Apps, Connectivity, VentureBeat, Wireless Networks / Posted By: Meghan Carney

We’ve all been there, while attending a major event you snap a picture to capture a big moment and want to share that photo with friends, family and your social network. Unfortunately, so does everyone else.  With the increased traffic, wireless networks become congested and connectivity becomes nearly impossible.

Our own Narayan Menon, Vice President of InterDigital Labs, has some advice for app makers that could increase their revenue while also improving the end-user’s experience.  In a guest post with VentureBeat, Narayan discusses sponsored connectivity, whereby app providers could allocate Wi-Fi capacity through algorithms or make automatic connections that retry upload requests every few minutes.

Narayan points out that a value-added offering, such as free connectivity, increases an app creator’s user-base, which could ultimately increase revenue through more advertising sales, and could also expand current customer loyalty.

Click here to read the full article and learn more.

August 14, 2014 / IEEE, IoT, M2M, oneM2M, SDN / Posted By: Meghan Carney

In the July issue of IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, Alex Reznik, Senior Principal Engineer, InterDigital Labs, participated as a guest editor for the Feature Topic entitled, Research and standards: Leading the evolution of telecom network architectures.  In total, 38 papers were submitted, all focused on ways to rethink mobile network architectures and protocols.  After review, the top seven papers were chosen and are highlighted in the current edition.

Included in the Feature Topic is An Architecture for Software Defined Wireless Networking, a paper which explores applying a traditionally wired networking technique, Software Defined Networking (SDN), to a wireless environment.  Juan Carlos Zuinga, InterDigital Principal Engineer, and Hao Jin, InterDigital Senior Engineer, along with the other contributing authors, explain that using an SDN-like approach in wireless mobile networks will push improvements beyond that of the wired case by leveraging distinct features of mobile deployments.  This article is also featured as IEEE’s Article of the month.

Toward A Standardized Common M2M Service Layer Platform: Introduction to OneM2M was also chosen as one of the articles in the July edition.  InterDigital’s Guang Lu assists in telling the OneM2M story – the next evolution in M2M connections.  In this article, the authors introduce the OneM2M Global Initiative, an international partnership project aimed at creating globally applicable and access-independent M2M service layer specifications related to M2M solutions. The authors explore use-cases, system architectures, and requirements for OneM2M.

Visit IEEExplore to read the latest issue of IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine and find the full articles mentioned above.

On June 18th, Angelo Cuffaro, Senior Director of InterDigital Labs, participated in an IEEE webinar panel along with industry experts from Texas Instruments, Shared Spectrum and Aviacomm.  The panel presented their views on how they believe the industry should address the impending bandwidth crunch.

Panelists discussed key topics within the spectrum harvesting space, including coexistence of secondary devices within spectrums like TV WhiteSpace, steps needed to enable spectrum sharing on a wider scale, the benefits of spectrum sensing in spectrum sharing models, and the requirements for RFIC transceivers to meet FCC requirements for non-interference within the TVWS broadband.  To hear the panelist’s assessment of these topics, and to view the full webinar, visit the IEEE site here.

Other key takeaways from the webinar were the poll results from the audience of approximately 140 participants.  When asked if spectrum harvesting was a viable model, 92% responded yes.  Votes on the best way to address a potential broadband crunch were a little more split, with the most popular option (50%) being the ability to share underutilized spectrum like the TVWS model:

[caption id="attachment_4403" align="aligncenter" width="626"]Spectrum Harvesting Bandwidth Crunch Survey Results IEEE & InterDigital Webinar: The Future of Spectrum Harvesting Technology, June 2014[/caption]

 

If you’re interested in additional information on spectrum harvesting, visit the InterDigital Vault to search through our latest videos, presentations and white papers.

June 13, 2014 / GeoWeb Summit, Internet of Things, IoT / Posted By: Meghan Carney

Prior to breaking for the Memorial Day holiday, pioneers in the emerging geoweb industry met in Brooklyn, NY for the most recent GeoWeb Summit.  This semi-annual forum serves as a platform for experts from the digital world to meet and discuss recent industry trends.  Summit # 8 focused largely on the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT).

On Day 2 of the summit, InterDigital’s Vice President of InterDigital Labs, Narayan Menon, gave a Keynote focusing on the next generation of IoT.  Narayan discussed some of the challenges facing today’s M2M ecosystem, including device diversity and network scale due to vertical solutions.  He explains that the next generation of IoT is all about horizontal platforms that enable scale and a rich landscape of applications that can support interoperability between the diverse devices, applications and networks in the market today.  If you’re interested in learning more about the next evolution of IoT, slides from Narayan’s presentation can be found here.

Learn more about the Internet of Things by searching for IoT or M2M at the InterDigital Vault.

 

June 3, 2014 / 5G, IEEE, Wireless Backhauls / Posted By: Meghan Carney

On June 10th the worldwide tech community will congregate in Sydney, Australia for one of IEEE’s flagship conferences – International Conference on Communications (ICC).   This year’s conference, “Communications: The Centrepoint of Digital Economy”, features a packed schedule of Keynotes, technical sessions, workshops, tutorials and panels \, all focused on furthering ICC’s cause – the advancement of wireless technology and communications.

The opening ceremonies will kick off with a Keynote by Professor Bijan Jabbari, George Mason University, where he will present recent research on advances in wireless technology, and discuss the requirements needed to make Machine to Machine (M2M) connections a part of our everyday lives.    Other notable presentations will cover everything from Defining the Wireless Future with Dr. Chih-Lin I, Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies at China Mobile, to a panel discussion on Advanced Technologies for Disaster-Resilient Networks, with much more in between.

InterDigital’s own Monisha Ghosh, Principal Engineer, will be joining a panel of experts on Wireless Backhauls for Future Broadband Networks.   On Friday, June 13th, Monisha, along with the other panelists will discuss how technologies like mmWave backhaul design are being developed to meet the ever-growing demands of the next generation wireless infrastructure.  In addition to opening the floor to a Q&A session, the panel will introduce the high speed low latency E-Band system that has been recently developed.

To learn more about Monisha’s work with wireless technology, check out the white paper she authored on 5G Carrier Grade Wi-Fi.