Vigyan Yuva awardee Radha Krishna Ganti: Setting the 5G template

The IIT Madras researcher describes his work in enabling standards for 5G coverage in rural India and developing indigenous 5G base stations.

Radha Krishna Ganti of IIT Madras, one of the winners of the Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards in Engineering Sciences, describes his work in enabling standards for 5G coverage in rural India and developing indigenous 5G base stations.

Radha Krishna Ganti.

What I do

For any generation of cellular systems, the requirements and evaluation criteria are decided by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). When the 5G requirements were being decided globally around 2011, rural broadband coverage was not a consideration for inclusion in defining 5G. Through the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI), the IT ministry and Department of Telecommunications, we spearheaded an effort to include rural coverage as one of the key performance indicators for 5G. We also built an end-to-end 5G testbed, with all the components (except the chips) developed indigenously.

How I do it

We defined a new test environment called Large-cell-Low-Mobility (LMLC) which looks at broadband connectivity in rural areas by utilising the BharathNet network. LMLC was accepted for inclusion as a mandatory feature in IMT 2020 (formal name for 5G) in ITU. This work is now being extended by India in 6G. We have also developed an Indian standard, 5Gi (an alternative to 5G). ITU ratified it globally, and it later got merged into 5G.

When 5G was being developed, we observed the lack of testbeds and prototypes for wireless research in India. Eight institutions approached DoT with a proposal to build a 5G testbed, and IIT Madras became the overall integrator of major subsystems.

The solution we have developed over the last four years is now deployed on our campuses and is used by startups to further develop wireless technologies. The technology has also been transferred to Tejas Networks and CDOT for integration into their products.

My research group works on several other projects including use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for next-generation wireless systems. We currently work on newer algorithms that will scale the performance in the next generation wireless systems. We are designing newer hardware architectures to building radios that perform better and cost less. We are also working with the armed forces in understanding on how 5G systems can help in their work.