LuxTurrim5G partner in spotlight
Aalto university is known as a community where science and art meet technology and business. In the joint research and development activities of the LuxTurrim5G ecosystem all those elements are in active use. Several research groups from Aalto contribute the joint development in their expert areas such as radio technology, thermal management, design of the smart poles and smart urban furniture and business models.
By merging three leading Finnish universities in 2010, Aalto was founded to work as a societally embedded research university combining technology, art and business. In a short space of time, it has become a forerunner and built a community and culture of entrepreneurship and innovation. The university has six schools with 12 000 students and 4 000 employees of whom about 400 are professors. The research focuses are set on seven key areas combining four core competences in the fields of ICT, materials, arts, design and business together with three grand challenges related to energy, living environment, and health.
Aalto university is active in the joint research of the LuxTurrim5G ecosystem in four main areas (leaders in parenthesis): radio technology development (Ass. prof. Katsuyuki Haneda) and thermal management (Ass. prof. Ville Vuorinen) of the smart poles, design of the smart poles and smart urban furniture (Prof. Kalevi Ekman) and business models (Prof. Heikki Hämmäinen & Prof. Taina Tukiainen).
“Radio technology development is one of the core elements in LuxTurrim5G”, says Katsuyuki Haneda. His group has been contributing to design of radio components in the smart poles and their measurements. Antenna radomes for base stations embedded into the smart poles are one, and radio measurements for vehicular environments are the other. Haneda is pleased with collaboration with respective companies that has made their works of practically relevance to the LuxTurrim5G ecosystem.
"Recycling thermal energy is a great contemporary challenge for societies aiming at carbon neutrality. It is essential to develop solutions for storing thermal energy from various devices such as 5G smart poles or data centers. Meanwhile, cooling such high-power electronics is essential. In the project Aalto University investigates thermal management of 5G smart poles, storage of thermal energy in phase change materials, and low-temperature district heating networks. For example, high-fidelity 3D numerical simulations are used to assess and design thermal performance of various systems. As a highlight, a proof-of-concept on a thermal battery has been developed by 3D printing them from aluminum. The developments can be utilized in various forward-looking applications", says Ville Vuorinen.
Aalto Design Factory (ADF) is an interdisciplinary product design and learning hub, bringing together students, teachers, researchers, and industry. The ADF LuxTurrim5G-team employs four designers from various backgrounds that have been developing the Smart Urban Furniture concept since February 2020. First, the composition of smart cities was analyzed comprehensively. It became evident that the inclusion of 5G technology will not only change the way city services operate, but also that the infrastructure of cities needs to be upgraded. Therefore, the ADF team has developed four collections of Smart Urban Furniture. These overall 55 products are designed to fit to the requirements and heritage of various cities. “One of the key insights is that the implementation of technology alone doesn’t make a city smart. Smart cities are not technology-centric, on the contrary, they are citizen-centric”, emphasizes Kalevi Ekman.
Examples of Smart Urban Furniture concepts by Aalto Design Factory
The human-centric approach led the team to develop a product-service ecosystem, where technology is used to enhance citizens’ wellbeing. The ADF team has collaborated with the City of Espoo and built an understanding of the customer needs together with the project partners. This collaborative and comprehensive design approach based on the different parties’ assessments has expanded the range of product opportunities of LuxTurrim5G. The Smart Urban Furniture generates value through social cohesion, improves city management and operations, and increases efficiency with fewer resources and lower environmental impact.
The studies on new business models in the Neutral Host Pilot project are carried out by two research groups: Network Economics (Department of Communications and Networking, Prof. Heikki Hämmäinen) and Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Department of Management Studies, Prof. Taina Tukiainen).
“Our modern society and growing cities face great challenges nowadays, e.g. to improve health, safety, energy efficiency, air quality, effectivity of transportation, and general quality of living. Cities have started to see the value of data. Data is needed for new services to enable sustainable economic growth and development in the city area and to meet the UN SDG’s, Sustainable Development Goals. Current operation models of mobile networks do not support the development of new data driven smart city services. There are no viable models for sharing data and creating the value from different data sources. This also sets new boundaries for the regulation of mobile networks. Without new solutions, cities will continue to implement vertical smart applications for single use or using more platform type approach but using still many different and often limited and not secured technologies”, says Taina Tukiainen.
The techno-economic feasibility of technical solutions of LuxTurrim5G are analyzed in the research group of Heikki Hämmäinen, at Department of Communications and Networking. “Smart city raises challenging platform questions regarding both the ecosystem structure and cost-benefit allocations”, says Hämmäinen. For instance, we study the feasibility of alternative value network configurations for data and connectivity platforms, deployment costs of smart 5G light pole deployments, and evolution of wireless city data traffic in terms of device types and application categories. We also have a special interest in smart transportation because of its low latency communication requirements and high societal impact. As a bonus, our research is well connected with teaching through field studies where MSc level student teams analyze the techno-economics of new smart city use cases in collaboration with companies, including cases like robot bus, electric car charging, bundling of bus stop safety zones, parcel home delivery using drones vs. public parcel kiosks vs. indoor building locker.
Read more about Aalto University: www.aalto.fi/en