Our society is on the brink of a new age with the development of new visionary concepts such as internet of things, autonomous driving, and coverage everywhere. This stimulates the use of new deployment concepts, such as Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), to support the wireless communication evolution. For 6G, a key use case which stands unaddressed by prior telecommunication generations, is that of coverage everywhere. A major candidate to solve this issue, is to deploy a network of satellites in an NTN configuration, which is front hauled by a high-gain gateway cell in order to serve rural and remote areas which up until now is lacking coverage. Here, especially novel energy efficient antenna systems are required to track fast moving satellites while meeting the cost targets of the consumer market. One of the major reasons for not addressing this thus far is the lack of expertise about non-terrestrial communication in the classical (terrestrial) telecommunication industry, which underpins the urgent need for a cross-disciplinary industrial doctorate network.
ANTERRA establishes a unique and well-structured training network with leading R&D labs from European industries, universities and technology institutes in the domain of antenna systems for terrestrial as well as non-terrestrial applications. The 15 researchers form a research team that is embedded in leading industrial and academic R&D labs. The programme strongly enhances the employability and career prospects of the researchers by offering a high-quality consortium with in-depth training in the technical areas as well as a comprehensive set of transferable skills relevant for innovation and long-term employability. The researchers are now in the transition phase towards their 18 months employment at their industrial secondment locations. In this way, the outcome of the research directly benefits the European industry, while the researchers gain experience in an industrial work environment. Moreover, the researchers are jointly developing a satcom demonstrator to strengthen their multi-disciplinary systems engineering skills. Here, they have completed the system definition phase where they worked out the system requirements and are now entering the design phase.
