On June 15th of 2007, an inauguration ceremony for the Sino-Swedish Strategic Cooperative Programme on Next Generation Networks: “IMT-Advanced and Beyond” was held in the conference room of Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA), which was attended by the officials from both Swedish and Chinese Governments, representatives from FuTURE FORUM, experts from nearly 20 research institutes, universities and enterprises from both Sweden and China. The seminar on the Sino-Swedish Cooperative Programme was subsequently held on the afternoon which symbolized that the cooperative project between Sweden and China on the development of advanced mobile communication technology had been formally started up and was ready for the pre-research preparation.

In February of 2007, senior officials from Department of International Cooperation and Department of High and New Technology Development and Industrialization under MOST of China, and principals from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA) and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) had a meeting in Beijing and reached an agreement that both sides would respectively invest RMB 30 million yuan to support the R&D of B3G mobile communication technology and network that will be conducted by both Swedish and Chinese research institutes and enterprises.
The project will focus on the future wireless network technology that will be applied in ten years. Based on the current research and consensus of the experts, higher frequency band with better spectrum utilization and lower power will be applied for the future wireless network technology. Through the R&D of innovative technology and solutions, simple modules together form advanced systems by well defined protocols and interfaces in a modular architecture; autonomic and self-organized networks, systems that require low costs and high volumes with focus on end-user services.
The research scope of the programme includes modulation and coding techniques, spectrum and propagation techniques; multiple access, multiple users, multiple distributed antenna systems; mobility management, control and routing; Ad Hoc – sensor- and mesh networking, cooperative networking; Automatic and self-organized networking; and Internet Protocols for wireless with guaranteed QoS requirements, resource optimization and management.

Having been negotiated by Swedish and Chinese Governments for half a year in the aspect of governmental strategies and expertise technology, the Sino-Swedish Strategic Cooperative Programme on Next Generation Networks has been started up with full support of FuTURE FORUM. The programme will be managed and monitored by the general coordinating advisory committee while the application proposal is being jointly accessed during the pre-research stage and is expected to be completed be the end of this year. The programme will be formally brought into effect on January 1st of 2008 and will last for three years. The additional investment will be considered according to the implementation during the three years so that the further research will be started accordingly.

Having made great investment to initiate an international cooperative R&D project in mobile communication industry, the Swedish and Chinese governments planned the fund, defined the research scope and worked out the administrative framework of the programme within quite a short period of time, which symbolized that both Swedish and Chinese governments had a desire for and would offer great support to the Sino-Swedish cooperation in wireless mobile communication industry and which indicated that China had been keeping its pace with the advanced international R&D capacity through the development and accumulations during nearly a decade. Through the R&D of the advanced techniques oriented to the next 5 to 10 years, China will gain more rights of speech and win a favorable position in the international development of wireless mobile communication technology. FuTURE FORUM, as an international platform for communication and exchange, will continue to play a more important role to introduce China’s technology and enterprises to the world and will definitely get stronger by participating more international cooperative projects.