Public Funding for Accelercomm Ltd

"The modern mobile handheld device is capable of providing a plethora of multimedia services through a wide range of applications over multiple networks. These services are predominantly driven by data which is increasingly associated with personal and commercially sensitive information. There is an increasing dependence on mobile devices with more than 5 billion users globally and this raises the security requirement for reliable and robust verification techniques of end-users that extends beyond the traditional point-of-entry.   This project will analyse the feasibility of developing a multi-modal continuous and transparent authentication architecture for mobile devices. The proposed solution will significantly enhance current state-of-the-art authentication approaches by using multiple biometric modalities (facial recognition, keystroke analysis, behavioural profiling) to continuously and transparently authenticate end-users. The proposed architecture will provide end-users with a convenient, non-intrusive, application specific authentication approach which is capable of understanding the different risk levels and requirements of individual applications.   The proposed architecture utilises existing hardware technologies such as facial recognition, keystroke analysis, application usage and fingerprint recognition to continuously authenticate end-users based on their psychological and behavioural characteristics. This solution is scalable and provides further opportunities for additional authentication modalities such as smartwatch physical activity recognition."

To address the hardware acceleration of signal processing algorithms for 5G mobile communication. It will transfer knowledge on novel algorithms and hardware architectures to AccelerComm, as well as on standardisation and commercialisation to the University of Southampton.

"Fifth generation (5G) mobile communication will support a greater range of applications than 4G. One of the new use cases is Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), which will be a key connectivity enabler for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). These vehicles will benefit from ultra-high performance communications, both with each other and with the Internet via 5G basestations. They will be able to communicate with 10x better reliability and 10x better delay than any previous mobile communication systems. For the first time, CAVs will be able to rely on mobile communications to exchange life-saving messages, which can avert collisions. The ultra-high reliability of URLLC will be achieved using Forward Error Correction (FEC). This will mitigate the communication errors that are inherent to mobile communication, caused by noise, interference and poor signal strength. However, FEC is the most computationally intensive process in mobile communications. Owing to this, vehicles will need to use dedicated hardware acceleration, so that FEC can be completed quickly enough to support ultra-low communication delays. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) will soon begin specifying the international standard for FEC in 5G URLLC. The proposed project will conduct a feasibility study on the application of a particular FEC code for URLLC, namely the polar code. Polar codes enable particularly high reliability, but are challenging to implement in hardware acceleration. Despite this, AccelerComm has developed patent-pending, first-to-market Intellectual Property (IP) on the hardware acceleration of polar codes. This IP solution has much greater hardware efficiency than all previous hardware acceleration implementations of polar codes. This project will significantly enhance the AccelerComm polar coding IP, extending its capability from eMBB applications to meet the much stricter and conflicting URLLC requirements of 10x improvements to reliability and latency. More specifically, innovative solutions will be developed to merge successive polar encoding steps at the hardware acceleration level. In addition to improving latency in this way, the conflicting requirement of improved reliability will be achieved simultaneously by adapting the AccelerComm polar coding IP to allow a flexible trade off with the hardware usage. Innovative solutions will be developed to achieve this while maintaining AccelerComm's unique hardware efficiency advantage over competitors. This project will also innovate to address the associated commercial challenges. In order to develop routes to the CAV market, the AccelerComm IP will be co-marketed alongside the complementary IP, chips and equipment of selected partners."

Wireless communication is now ubiquitous, with technology advances enabling ever more demanding applications. Mobile handset users are increasingly using the 4G cellular network for watching high definition video and for low delay Internet browsing. New applications like online gaming, virtual reality, cloud applications, vehicular safety and remote control of robotics will underpin the drive towards higher data rates and lower delays in 5G. However, these technology advances have been stalled by a bottleneck, which is imposed by the biggest part of the processing involved in wireless communication, namely the error correction that must be performed to ensure reliability. This bottleneck will prevent the achievement of the target data-rate and communication delay in 4G, 4.5G and 5G base-stations, as well as in 5G handsets. AccelerComm offers a unique technology that solves exactly these problems. Our patented TurboAccelerator radically changes this error correction processing for the first time in 20 years. We can increase data rate by 10 times and reduce delay by 10 times, while maintaining comparable hardware efficiency, energy efficiency and error correction capability.