Research and Development of Next-Generation Edge Cloud Computing Infrastructure to Support Beyond 5G Ultra-High Capacity Wireless Communication

Technologies that integrate cyberspace with physical space are indispensable for promoting the "Super Smart Society (Society 5.0)" promoted by the government. We interviewed Prof. Fumio Koyama, the head of the research team working on projects that include empirical research in collaboration with industry and academia to realize such technologies.

Please tell us about the purpose and features of this research project.

Koyama: The Cabinet Office is currently promoting the "Super Smart Society," or so-called "Society 5.0." Technologies that integrate cyberspace with the physical space of the real world are indispensable to achieve this. This in turn requires information transmission technologies that connect a large amount of information at high speed as well as information processing infrastructure technologies that process information at high speed in cyberspace.

In our current project, we are developing hardware technologies that perform high-speed information transmission using new hardware that did not exist previously or that performs high-performance information processing close to the device. Our development encompasses not only hardware but hardware-based technologies that support services for various needs and applications through network slicing, as well as novel computing technologies that achieve extremely high resource efficiency by grouping CPUs and GPUs or memory and storage. Furthermore, our project is unique because it has an extremely wide scope that includes even empirical research on the development of automated driving and other new applications for the beyond 5G era.

How is the project organized?

Koyama: This project is quite ambitious in the sense that we hope to implement the results of the project in the real world. Our project involves 12 research teams and around 50 researchers, but the actual number of researchers is several times larger as graduate students at universities are involved.

What do you hope to achieve from the results of this project?

Koyama: A "Super Smart Society" has the potential to address various challenges confronting Japan, such as our declining birthrate and aging population, as well as issues related to health, safety, disaster prevention, security, energy, and agriculture. We hope that the new hardware technologies, information processing infrastructure software technologies, application technologies, and other technologies developed in our project will be useful for achieving a “Super Smart Society.”

Thank you very much.