Meet the SPIRIT Partners: an interview with Ning Wang and Peng Qian from University of Surrey 

Ning Wang

Prof. Ning Wang is currently leading a research group on intelligent and high-performance networks and services at the 5G/6G Innovation Centre (5/6GIC) hosted at University of Surrey. His main research areas include future network systems, network and service management, and multimedia communications. Prof. Ning Wang has been actively involved in European research and innovation collaborations for more than 20 years with the participation of around 15 European projects in the areas of Future Internet, 5G and beyond, network management, content delivery technologies, and IoT applications. From August 2024, Prof. Ning Wang will be at the University of Bristol, where the SPIRIT project will also be transferred.

Peng Qian

Peng Qian received his B.Eng. degree from the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (Nanjing, China) in 2008, M.Sc. degree (Hons.) in 2013, and Ph.D. degree in 2018 from the University of Surrey, Home of 5G/6G Innovation Centre. He has worked as a senior research software engineer in UK5G, EPSRC NGCDI and EU-SPIRIT projects, conducting research, implementation, and deployment of holographic video streaming applications in next generation network infrastructure. He was working in telecommunication industry from 2008 to 2012. In April 2024, he joined the Computer Infrastructure group at University of Oxford, as a senior research software engineer in SmartEdge. His research interests include Web and extended reality content streaming and acceleration, mobile edge computing, and next-generation Internet networking protocols.

Q: Tell us more about University of Surrey.  

A: The University of Surrey (UoS) is a prestigious UK University involved in research and teaching and has been one of the most active higher education institutes in European R&D project participation over the past 30 years. In 2013 it received £12m from the UK Government and £50m from industry to set up the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at Surrey. In November 2021, the Centre was rebranded into 5G/6G Innovation Centre, which will further embrace 6G networking research. As part of the 5G/6GIC, a 5G and beyond testing network infrastructure (including 5G RAN, transport, core network, and edge computing platforms) has been implemented around the Surrey campus and also covering part of Guildford. This comprehensive 5G testing infrastructure serves as one of the use case testing sites in SPIRIT.

Q: What inspired you to join the SPIRIT project?

A: Surrey is among the initial participants of the SPIRIT proposal preparation. From our point of view, there are two main reasons to start the project bidding from the beginning. Firstly, network support of immersive media delivery, especially holographic communications, is among the most essential items for investigation in the overall research landscape at the 5G/6G Innovation Centre. This involves a wide spectrum of innovations on network intelligence, resource management, content adaptation, as well as user Quality of Experiences (QoE) modelling and analysis. As such, the SPIRIT project becomes an ideal vehicle for strengthening our research, innovation, and development in relevant technical areas.

Furthermore, over the past 10 years we have been developing the unique testing infrastructure with end-to-end 5G capabilities for supporting the experiment of various emerging networked applications. The SPIRIT project, especially with its open call for third-party experiments, offers a unique opportunity to test our 5G infrastructure with a wide variety of immersive telepresence applications encompassing heterogeneous requirements. These emerging requirements will also help to drive the future development of new capabilities of our testing infrastructure. 

Q: What is your contribution to the project?

A: Surrey is leading WP2 for the development of the SPIRIT use cases and also the definition of the overall SPIRIT platform architecture. Specifically, we contribute to the project with a novel telepresence use case of multi-source live streaming of holographic media, which requires frame synchronisation among sources in order to avoid human-perceivable misalignment. 

In WP3, we are focusing on the innovation of intelligent content quality adaptation based on multiple human and environmental factors, such as the movement of source objects, viewer intentions and behaviours, as well as network traffic conditions. The ultimate goal is to enhance and assure user QoE performance in dynamic or even unpredictable environments. 

Our involvement in WP4 and WP5 mainly concerns the development and maintenance of the testing environment for hosting the experiments on both the project defined use cases and those provided by third-party participants.

In WP6, the Surrey team is actively involved in project dissemination activities, especially in terms of scientific publications.

Q: How do you think SPIRIT will contribute to European society?

A: The UK’s return to European research collaborations in the context of Horizon Europe is vital for sustainable and strengthened research collaborations between UK organisations and their EU counterparts towards win-win situations. 

Specifically in the areas of immersive telepresence, the SPIRIT project aims to advance the technology readiness level (TRL) based on promising use case applications developed by industry (especially SMEs) and academic institutions, thus placing Europe in a global leading position in the area of immersive media and Metaverse applications.