CSIRO's collaborations with China have gone from strength to strength.

Australia-China Research Centre for Wireless Communications

A strategic alliance between the Australian and Chinese Governments led by CSIRO and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

• 28 February 2011 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Aims
• Beginnings 
• Research collaborations and outcomes  
• Australia-China ICT Summits  
• Future perspective
• Partners   

Aims

The centre provides a hub for long-term cooperation between research communities in both countries, focusing on future wireless communications technologies.

The centre will facilitate:

• joint research projects 
• the exchange of scientists and research students
• the uptake of Australian wireless communications technologies by the world market.

The collaboration will promote cross-fertilisation in science and provide an excellent opportunity for the outcomes of scientific research to have major impact in the world market.

Beginnings

The Honourable Maxine McKew MP and Dr Cao Jianlin, Vice-Minister, Ministry of Science and Technology, opening the Centre.

Supported by the Australian Government’s Australia-China Special Fund for International Science Linkage and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), CSIRO joined forces with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) to establish the Australia-China Research Centre for Wireless Communications.

The centre was launched on 3 March 2009 by The Honourable Maxine McKew MP, Member for Bennelong, and Dr Cao Jianlin, Vice-Minister, MOST.

At the time of its inception the centre was Australia’s largest research collaboration with China in information and communication technologies (ICT).

Read more in Broadband wireless research gets ‘green’ light (Media release 3 Mar 09).

Research collaborations and outcomes

In less than two years, the Centre has fostered the creation of joint research projects, the exchange of scientists and students, and produced significant outcomes including 36 scientific papers.

Research outcomes include:

• reconfigurable antennas for cognitive regional area networks and future wireless systems
• new algorithms for distributed cooperative networks
• a software radio-based 3GPP LTE system.

CSIRO has hosted a large number of long- and short-term visitors from Chinese universities and academies. Three CSIRO staff hold visiting professorships at Chinese universities, and they and others have lectured at a number of Chinese institutions.

Australia-China ICT Summit

The summit sets out to advance research and promote collaboration

With the aim of advancing research and promoting collaborations, the Australia-China ICT
Summit program was established by CSIRO and the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (STCSM) with the support of MOST.

An influential group of policy makers, industry leaders and researchers gather to focus on areas of high importance and common interest.

The first Summit was held in Shanghai, China in November 2009, the second was in Hobart, Australia in November 2010. The third will be held in China in September 2011.

Outcomes from the Summits include:

• a collaborative project in e-health between the Queensland and Shanghai governments
• the Shanghai government allocating funds to the Shanghai Research Centre for Wireless Communications for two networking projects between themselves, CSIRO and Macquarie University
• MOST and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation agreeing to support joint projects
• memorandum of understanding signed between CSIRO and Shanghai Jiaotong University
• letters of intent exchanged between CSIRO and Huawei Technologies.

Future perspective

The Centre’s vision is to deepen the collaboration between our two countries by broadening our thinking and skills base.

We aim to tackle larger scale problems with more varied teams of scientists and engineers supported with greater funding from industry.

Our inspirations include:

• low cost, high performance wireless connectivity for rural and remote communities
• greener approaches such as energy harvesting and usage minimisation
• specialised applications such as industrial safety, environmental monitoring, and radio astronomy.

Partners

CSIRO has established joint research projects and scholar exchange programs with Chinese universities, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) and businesses.

These include:

• Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications (BUPT)
• Peking University
• Shanghai Jiaotong University
• Southeast University
• Xidian University
• Shanghai Research Centre for Wireless Communications (WiCO)
• Institute of Computing Technology (CAS ICT)
• Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology (CAS SIMIT)
• China Electronic Technology Corporation (CETC) Group
• China Electronics Corporation (CEC) Group
• Huawei Technologies.

CSIRO’s Australian partners include:

• Sydney University
• University of New South Wales (UNSW)
• Macquarie University
• University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)
• University of South Australia
• University of Western Australia
• Telstra.

Read more in the CSIRO in China Overview.