A project that allows telecom providers to pinpoint anomalies that could trigger outages or other issues in networks has won the overall award at the Alcatel-Lucent Open Innovation Boot Camp in Dublin.
The IPMOD project, which was spawned by a research team at Alcatel-Lucent Newport in South Wales, won the innovation award yesterday afternoon at an awards ceremony held in Alcatel-Lucent’s Blanchardstown, Dublin, hub.
Ireland’s Minister of State with responsibility for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock, TD, handed out the award to the winning team, along with Julie Byrne, the executive director of Bell Labs Ireland, and Lucy Dimes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent UK.
IPMOD solution – already commercialised
Based on three years of research, the IPMOD solution has been designed to review complex configurations and to look for anomalies that could cause outages or other problems in IP and telecom networks.
The solution is already being used by telecoms providers, said the team yesterday, adding that their solution performs network configuration audits and will give a snapshot of a network, so as to pinpoint issues such as device mis-configurations and security gaps.
The team will now go on to represent Ireland and the UK at the Alcatel-Lucent finals in Paris in April.
Four other finalists
IPMOD was up against four other research projects, which hailed from Tyndall National Institute, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), the Telecommunications and Software Systems Group (TSSG) and Alcatel-Lucent Ireland.
Tyndall’s project was around long range Ethernet. The team has developed a patented technology, which it says can facilitate the delivery of high-speed Ethernet at low cost over longer distances than existing solutions. The team said yesterday its technology addresses a gap in the 40G/100GHz transceiver market, which is anticipated to grow to US$1.2bn by 2015.
DERI research
Meanwhile, the team at DERI at National University of Ireland, Galway, has developed a framework called service offer discovery (SOFFD). The team described it as a software framework for configuring, discovering and consuming online internet services. SOFFD is a generic service search engine that has applications for areas such as telecoms, cloud computing, finance and insurance.
COSMAS – team at TSSG
The TSSG team at Waterford Institute of Technology has come up with a technology called compressive small cell management solutions (COSMAS). The team is working towards designing, developing and providing network-based intelligence software applications and management solutions for small cell telecom networks, which the team said could range from long-term evolution (LTE) to femto-cell networks.
Always there data
The remaining project came from Alcatel-Lucent Ireland. Always there data (ATD) is aiming to provide high-speed secure and network efficient data backup for enterprises. The team said the technology deploys a multi-tier system, local cluster and cloud technologies to utilise existing disk space and remove dependency on a single cloud provider, with the aim of reducing operational costs within enterprises.
Commercial value or research
Byrne spoke yesterday about how the Boot Camp aims to help connect research with industry to find commercial value for projects. She said 25 teams had initially applied for this year’s Open Innovation Boot Camp.
DCU Ryan Academy was a key part of the boot camp, providing mentoring and strategic business advice to each of the teams.
Watch a video about IPMOD winning the Alcatel-Lucent Open Innovation Boot Camp:
The winning team IPMOD from Alcatel-Lucent, Newport, South Wales
