Heinz Brüggemann
Director Celtic Office
brueggemann(at)celticplus.eu

For some years Celtic has honoured the most successful and most promising finished projects with an excellence award. This year the Celtic Core Group decided to create another award, the Celtic Innovation Award. The first Innovation Award went to the WINNER+ project.

In the Celtic Excellence Awards category, the SERVERY project received the Gold Award, OPERA-Net received the Silver Award, and HNPS the Bronze Award.

“We are very proud to have such impressively successful projects within our programme portfolio,” said Celtic-Plus chairman Jacques Magen.

Celtic Innovation Award Winner 2012: WINNER+

The newly created Celtic Innovation Award was presented by Charlotte Brogren, the Director General of Vinnova, to Werner Mohr, the WINNER+ project leader from NSN Germany. The project acronym stands for Wireless World Initiative New Radio.

Ms Brogren praised WINNER+ as a very good example of how European collaborative research activities can complement each other. WINNER started as an FP7 EU project and was continued and finalised as WINNER+ in Celtic, where it carried out verifications and an implementation of the new 4G mobile standards technologies LTE and LTE-advanced.

With LTE and LTE-advanced we have, for the first time, a truly global mobile standard, she explained. This is true not only for Europe but also now in the US and China. This is clearly a huge success for European industry, which has played a significant role in the development of the standard, thanks to the three WINNER projects both in FP7 and in Celtic.

According to Ms Brogren WINNER+ and the European LTE/ LTE-advanced activities should even be regarded as a GSM-like opportunity to strengthen European industry in the area of new high-speed mobile technology.

The WINNER+ project was a key contributor to the LTE-advanced standardization work and responsible for evaluating the candidate technology proposals for LTE-advanced in ITU-R. WINNER+ demonstrated the feasibility of the key radio interface technologies and supported the leadership of European industry in delivering LTE networks, which will be next big wave in mobile communications.

Finally, Ms Brogren pointed out that after the world’s first commercial 4G/LTE network was launched in Stockholm on 14 December 2009, the worldwide number of 4G/LTE subscribers is now at around 10 million.

Celtic Excellence Awards 2012

Every year Celtic selects the three best finished projects for the gold, silver and bronze excellence award.

The selection criteria are looking in particular at the business impact, including especially new products traceable from the project results, and strong other impact like creation of new business lines, new jobs, strongly influencing standards. The difference compared to the Celtic Innovation Award is that we are looking here mostly at the expected impact because the projects were just completed; however some projects already have industrial impact even during their lifetime or shortly after they are finished.

The awards are mainly based on successful mid-term and final reviews and impact assessments. The final selection of the gold, silver, and bronze award winners is then made by the Celtic Core Group members.

Celtic Gold Award winner: SERVERY

SERVERY has realized prototypes and evaluations of an open European service marketplace. The system competes with the Apple store and other online selling points for Apps. In addition to service delivery it also allows to create and to commercialize multimedia services to mobile and fixed broadband users. It gives the possibility for end users to access a great deal of innovative services created by professionals or by the user community.

The business relevance is considered to be very high. Project partners have already created several new products; the most advanced is the BlueVia sales-portal from Telefónica which integrates several Servery functionalities. Alcatel-Lucent, Bull and NSN have also integrated results from SERVERY into some of their new products. The project was led by Jean Pierre Le Rouziv from Orange FT, France.

Celtic Silver Award winner: OPERA-Net

The OPERA-Net project (Optimising Power Efficiency in mobile Radio Networks) focused on a holistic approach for the reduction of power consumption and for evaluating the network elements and their interdependencies. The business relevance of OPERA-Net is very high: reduction of power consumption is ensured through the network analysis when base stations are in sleep mode and the related efficiency improvement that can be achieved. Another very strong point is the Odyssee simulation tool that was extended to include power consumption and power monitoring as an important tool for reducing power consumption of the network. The project was led by Régis Esnault from Orange FT, France.

Celtic Bronze Award winner: HNPS

Finally, Harold Linke from HITEC Luxembourg received the Bronze Award for HNPS (Heterogeneous Network for European Public Safety). The project focused on a well-controlled integration of communication systems, including private mobile radio systems and broadband services, using fixed or deployed networks. This controlled integration led to the concept of heterogeneous networks for future European public safety communications.

The project developed a security platform that allows to seamlessly and autonomously use 6 different network technologies. The system can integrate 4 different types of fast deployable mobile networks including Wireless Sensor Networks. Major achievements of the project are also the five demonstrations of the HNPS system to the user communities including policemen and fire-fighters.

HNPS has played an important role already in the development of 8 new products, and another 8 products were improved in incorporating results from the project. More business impact is expected in the future.



Celtic Award winners 2012 and their project teams