FDD, Full Duplex, is a hot topic in the 3GPP and IEEE 802.11 worlds. Yesterday, the 3G4G Blog, a UK-based blog investigating topics of interest to the wireless engineering community, published a post titled ‘Real’ Full Duplex (or No Division Duplex – NDD?) covering FDD from various perspectives. InterDigital engineer Alain Mourad’s presentation, “Potential of Full Duplex for Future Wireless Systems,” was included as part of the coverage of this topic. Read the full post to view the slide deck.

InterDigital is an executive sponsor and key sponsor at the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, which this week is hosting its flagship annual event, TC3 (Telecom Council Carrier Connections). Bringing together Bay Area representatives from major operators, device companies and application providers worldwide, TC3 is a showcase for operator requirements, various experts from rapidly converging areas of wireless, and views from the future.

Today, Jim Nolan, Executive Vice President, InterDigital Solutions, joined Telecom Council head Derek Kerton to discuss 5G, the array of technologies – and there are many – that will contribute to establishing the network of the future. Part of his discussion was around 60GHz and millimeter wave as well as Network-as-a-Service, which is an increasing trend that InterDigital is very focused on.

“It’s evolving towards what we call The Living Network, which is when devices are able to self-provision, networks are able to self-optimize, and all the other sensors and devices the user is accessing are able to drive data that delivers an immersive user experience but also integrates the user’s and connection’s context into service,” said Jim.

For more information on InterDigital’s 5G, millimeter wave and 60GHz research, make sure to visit the InterDigital Vault at http://vault.interdigital.com.

Three professors from Columbia University, in collaboration with InterDigital’s Dr. Ariela Zeira as the industrial principal co-investigator, have been awarded a $750,000 three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum (EARS) Program for a project titled “Low-Power, Multi-Tiered, Shared-Spectrum Access Terminals using Compressive Scanning and On-Top-of-CMOS BAW Filter Banks.”

This project will evaluate challenges that exist in a multi-tiered, shared-spectrum access communication system. The research will focus on using tier-3 cognitive radio terminals to dynamically leverage spectrum that is being underutilized at the time. InterDigital’s industrial partnership will provide the research professors with real-world application expertise and system integration knowledge.

To learn more about the research grant, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1343282&HistoricalAwards=false.

PIMRC‘14 (IEEE 25^th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications), which ran from September 2-5 in Washington, DC, was a huge success, and InterDigital is proud to have been a significant contributor. The conference was focused on 5G technologies, aligning closely with our own focus.

Conference topics ranged from innovative enhancements to network architectures to groundbreaking and potentially controversial new concepts. As the place where all sides of the industry come together to discuss ideas, PIMRC was the perfect venue for these conversations.

One panel, “Opportunities and Challenges for LTE (-U) and WiFi Coexistence in Unlicensed and Shared Spectrum,” included InterDigital’s Mihaela Beluri, and addressed the hot-button issue of LTE using unlicensed spectrum. Mihaela discussed possible solutions to what seems to be a controversial topic. Doug Castor, also one of our engineers, spoke on a panel entitled “mm-Waves Technology as an Essential Element for Next Generation Mobile Cellular Systems,” which discussed the emerging evidence showing mm-Wave as a viable solution for network capacity growth.

In addition to the panels, two sessions were chaired by InterDigital employees, with Meilong Jiang chairing “Limited/Implicit Feedback” and Ahmed S. Ibrahim chairing “Physical Layer Network Coding.” Our engineers also contributed three papers to the technical program: “Reliable RF Beamforming for Millimeter Wave MIMO-OFDM Systems” (Ahmed S. Ibrahim), “Efficient Adaptive Vertical Downtilt Schemes in LTE-Advanced Networks” (Meilong Jiang, Mohsen Hosseinian, Moon-il Lee, Janet Stern-Berkowitz), and “Sub-Channel Selection for Multi-User Channel Access in Next Generation WiFi” (Hanqing Lou, Juan Fang, Oghenekome (Kome) Oteri, Monisha Ghosh, Pengfei Xia, Robert L. Olesen).

The timing of these discussions at PIMRC is critical – not only is 3GPP discussing LTE-U for a decision expected to be released this month, but the industry is gearing up for the 2015 WRC (World Radio Conference), held every few years as a global gathering of regulatory bodies and standards groups. During that conference,  important decisions about the global use of radio spectrum and how to seamlessly deploy technologies worldwide will be discussed.

To learn more about 5G, visit the InterDigital Vault and search “5G.”

Byung K. Yi, InterDigital’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, InterDigital Labs, spoke as a panelist during the Smart Cloud Show, a leading technology conference hosted in South Korea by Chosun Biz, a top business publication in the region. The conference, which is open September 2-4, is focused on trends in IT and communications, and attracts industry professionals from around the globe.

Earlier today, B.K. addressed the Third Industrial Revolution, which is considered the future of commerce in this century. He also commented on who he believes is best positioned to prosper in this new economic future.

In the July-September issue of IEEE MultiMedia magazine, InterDigitals’ Yan Ye co-authored a paper exploring “The Scalable Extensions of HEVC for Ultra-High-Definition Video Delivery.” This invited article addresses the current trends in the video delivery marketplace, including the anticipated increase of UHD content being delivered to consumers.

Scalable video coding for the H.265/HEVC standard (SHVC) is studied in this article as an attractive coding option for HD to UHD transition, which includes storage and bandwidth efficiency for delivery, as well as channel error robustness. The SHVC provides efficient coding solutions for varying screen resolutions, color gamuts and bit depths.

For even more information on this topic, visit the InterDigital Vault and search for “video delivery.”

InterDigital’s CEO, Bill Merritt, will appear on The Fox Business Network’s “Countdown to the Closing Bell” tomorrow, Tuesday, July 22. Bill was invited to appear as part of a week-long series highlighting mid-cap companies with the best percentage gains year to date and, according to the show, InterDigital is among the top five. Tune in to The Fox Business Network tomorrow, July 22, from 3:00-4:00PM Eastern, to see the full interview.

Update (7/23/14 at 1:45 PM): As seen on The Fox Business Network's "Countdown to the Closing Bell" yesterday, Bill Merritt, InterDigital president and CEO, discusses our company's stock performance and technologies.  Watch the video on The Fox Business Network's website.

In their June issue, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine published “Toward a Standardized Common M2M Service Layer Platform: Introduction to OneM2M”, a paper written by a team of industry experts which included Guang Lu, an InterDigital staff engineer. This article addresses a major M2M challenge – the fragmentation created by multiple proprietary solutions that do not communicate with one another.

This challenge is being met by the oneM2M Global Initiative, an international partnership project. The oneM2M standardization solution was initiated by seven major telecom standards defining organizations with the objective of reducing fragmentation of M2M service layer standards through global specifications, paving the way for M2M interoperability across industry verticals. Standards that allow for a common platform and a common set of APIs will ultimately shorten time to market, aiding a faster realization of a true M2M ecosystem.

This paper delves into the various working groups of oneM2M and the standardization efforts being undertaken by each. For even more information on M2M and the future of the IoT, please visit the InterDigital Vault.

On June 26, CommNexus hosted a panel discussion, Making M2M: Secure and Economically Viable, in San Diego, CA. InterDigital’s Phillip Brown joined the panel, which included industry experts from Tagnos, ViaSat and Verizon Wireless and was moderated by a product manager from Qualcomm.

The panel argued that one of the most important barriers to complete M2M adoption is security risks. Any solutions to potential security threats need to be both effective and economical in order to make the technology viable and marketable overall. Watch the full discussion to see what the panelists had to say. Visit the InterDigital Vault for more information on M2M.

In 2009, Dr. George Smith received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with his partner Willard Boyle for their invention, the charge-coupled device (CCD), designed during their tenure at Bell Labs. The CCD made digital imaging possible, from the earliest fax machines through modern cell phone cameras, changing the technology landscape forever.

On May 10, Dr. Smith spoke at InterDigital’s annual Innovators’ Awards Dinner, which honors the company’s most prolific and successful engineers. During his time with us, he sat down for a short interview with Diana Pani, one of our top innovators. In the interview, Dr. Smith talks about what it was like inventing such an important piece of technology, what it feels like to win the Nobel Prize, and what “innovation” really means to him.

InterDigital’s M2M team was recently published in the prestigious IEEE Communications Magazine with their article, “CA-P2P: Context-Aware Proximity-Based Peer-to-Peer Wireless Communications.” The work was co-authored by Chonggang Wang, Qing Li, Hongkun Li, Paul Russell, Jr. and Zhuo Chen, all engineers at InterDigital.

The authors argue that CA-P2P may be a viable solution to both existing and new proximity-based services, including commercial applications such as advertising as well as emergency/disaster relief, when centralized networks may become unavailable.  Taking various levels of context into account during the P2P connection results in quick, efficient peer discovery and peer association. This will become increasingly important in the emerging fifth generation, with growing numbers of small cell and D2D communications becoming common.

The paper delves into the benefits and challenges of CA-P2P and offers performance evaluations of simulations as evidence. Interested in learning even more? Visit our Vault, where you can search keywords such as peer-to-peer, device-to-device, D2D and IoT to find additional resources.

InterDigital’s Annual Shareholders’ Meeting will be held on Thursday, June 12, 2014, starting at 11:00AM Eastern at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Wilmington. Subject to space availability, all shareholders as of April 15, 2014, the record date for the meeting, are invited to attend. For any shareholders who are unable to attend the event in person, we will also be webcasting the proceedings for your convenience.

Use this link to join the webcast at 11:00 on June 12.

In this Q&A-style video, Alex Giladi discusses the main benefits for operators and vendors of using MPEG-DASH, the new international standard for adaptive streaming. He also touches upon how ad insertion is handled and the reasons why this technology is hot today. Alex is a Senior Manager, Video Software Architect, at InterDigital, as well as an active member of the DASH community – he is the editor of several MPEG standards and leads multiple activities in the DASH Industry Forum and SCTE DVS.

Want to learn more about our video technologies? Visit http://solutions.interdigital.com/solutions/video.

InterDigital’s CEO, Bill Merritt, will make an exclusive appearance tonight, June 3, on CNBC’s Fast Money, following today’s earlier announcement of the company’s recent agreement with Samsung. Be sure to tune in to CNBC at 5:30PM Eastern tonight for more.

Update (6/3/14 at 7:15 PM): As seen on CNBC's Fast Money earlier tonight, Bill Merritt, InterDigital president and CEO, weighs in on its new patent deal with Samsung covering 3G, 4G, and future generation devices through 2017.  Watch the video below, or view it directly on the CNBC website.

InterDigital’s CEO, Bill Merritt, discussed the ways our company is evolving for the future, touching on everything from M2M and IoT through our more traditional work in standards development and patent research, in a recent CEO Spotlight published by RCR Wireless.

Bill talked about how the market for M2M is “enormous” and highlighted some of the measures we are taking to be a major player on the forefront of this technology. He also emphasized that wireless standards development remains a huge opportunity – a $10-20 billion industry – and a main focus of InterDigital’s efforts moving forward. Read the full RCR interview for details.

RCR Wireless recently published a special report on video optimization, and InterDigital’s video streaming and compression technology, Perceptual Pre-Filtering, was mentioned as a unique new solution to this market on pages 8 and 12 of the report. Our technology detects not only the streaming device but also the user, using information about their environment and proximity to the device to effectively reduce video download size without any perceptible loss in quality. This is achieved by filtering out visual content that the human eye cannot see in certain viewing conditions. To learn more about our video optimization technology, you can read this Perceptual Pre-Filtering overview or read more at solutions.interdigital.com.

Each year, ABI Research publishes their Mobile World Congress Roundup, showcasing the most interesting new technologies revealed in Barcelona that year. This year, InterDigital was mentioned for our work in 60 GHz mmW and phased array antennas and our recent partnership with Imec to develop cost-effective solutions for small cell backhaul and 5G wireless technologies.

Mobile World Congress, where we exhibit every year, is one of the biggest shows in the industry and is home to the unveiling of many new technologies and ideas, so we’re honored to be recognized as a company that stood out from the crowd.

Do you want to learn more about these technologies? Then visit our Vault, where you can search for terms like “small cell,” “5G” and “phased array antennas.”

Friday, May 2 was the 10^th annual Long Island Systems, Applications and Technology Conference (LISAT), a regional IEEE event. InterDigital has been a longtime supporter of the LISAT Conference, and this year, six of our experts joined the conversation with their own presentations. Dr. Robert DiFazio, a Wireless Research Fellow at InterDigital, opened with a short introduction focused on a vision for the future, entitled, “The Living Network – Moving Towards 5G Wireless.”

In addition to Dr. DiFazio’s discussion on 5G, five of InterDigital’s engineers presented on a range of topics focused on the future of wireless technology. Jane Mack, Senior Staff Engineer, InterDigital Labs, discussed field trials for a Spectrum Sharing prototype under development by InterDigital. Benoit Pelletier, Senior Staff Engineer, discussed device-to-device communications, and John Cartmell, Technical Staff Member, InterDigital Labs, spoke about a new technique enabling small cells to meet law enforcement requirements. Xiaofei Wang outlined next-generation Wi-Fi concepts and Patrick Cabrol described an antenna design for a mmWave mesh testbed. Both are Senior Staff Engineers at InterDigital.

Interested in learning more about 5G technology? Visit our Vault and search for “5G.”

EDN Network’s From the Edge recently covered an expert discussion on 5G technology held during Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Alan Carlton, senior director of InterDigital Labs and head of InterDigital Europe, based in London, sat down with Dr. Liesbet Van der Perre, IMEC program director for wireless communications, and Dr. Rui Aguiar, a professor at the University of Aveiro and a member of the Board of the 5G Public Partnership Project (5GPPP), to discuss the future of 5G technologies and what we can expect.

Among other topics, the group discussed the requirements behind 5G technology, such as latency requirements, as well as the benefits of 5G over 4G, the current state of research and anticipated timeframes. Research is clearly underway, with a focus on collectively defining a vision for 5G. According to Alan Carlton, “Some of the key enabling building blocks are being developed today that will likely be big enablers in the 5G timeframe.” Timing is hard to predict, but these experts agree that smaller 5G systems could be expected as soon as 2020, with larger-scale commercial systems in the years following.

Watch the full discussion, or read the complete transcript on EDN Network's From the Edge. Visit the InterDigital Vault to learn more about our 5G research and technology.

With MPEG-DASH second edition core standards about to be published by ISO/IEC, the future of the technology was a focal point of the DASH Talks, held during the NAB Show earlier this month in Las Vegas and summarized in “Industry Experts Discuss the Future of MPEG-DASH at NAB,” by Streaming Media Magazine. A panel of experts, including InterDigital’s own Alex Giladi, senior manager, Video Software Architect, discussed everything from the challenges and benefits of DASH to advertising insertion.

To learn more about this technology, search “DASH” or “MPEG-DASH” on the InterDigital Vault.

Monisha Ghosh, principal engineer at InterDigital, was recently published on EDN Network with “Addressing expanding wireless data usage? Turn to carrier grade Wi-Fi,” focusing on the reasons carrier grade Wi-Fi may be the solution to continuously growing data usage. With a large percentage of mobile traffic choosing Wi-Fi over cellular service when available, and increasing numbers of public Wi-Fi networks to meet that demand, overall data usage is projected to expand significantly.

Monisha argues that the solution resides in carrier grade Wi-Fi once specific challenges, including throughput, quality and deployment, are resolved. In her article, she delves into three technologies that might address these requirements: multi-user parallel channel access, uplink multi-user MIMO, and fractional CSMA and transmit power control. Read the article on EDN Network for full details.

Want to learn more about carrier grade Wi-Fi? Read our whitepaper, “5G Carrier Grade Wi-Fi: Requirements and Technologies.”