Communication in the future!

Universitätstage Erlangen in Amberg took place for the 45th time this year. This year’s theme was ‘Visions’. These were illuminated from very different perspectives: Not only visions of the future, but also utopias in literature and predictions of impossibility were presented.

With the question ‘How will we communicate in the future?’, Prof Franchi from the Chair of Electrical Smart City Systems (ESCS) looked at a possible contribution of electrical engineering to the topic of ‘Visions of networking’: A world without digital networking is already inconceivable today. Around 20 billion devices are currently actively connected to the internet, but this figure will more than double before 2030. The proportion of wirelessly networked systems in particular will increase rapidly. This development is being driven by the buzzwords ‘mobility’, ‘digitalisation’, ‘smart cities’, ‘logistics’, ‘Industry 4.0/5.0’, as well as modern forms of work and the connection of the approximately 3 billion people without Internet access today.
At the same time, the consequences of climate change, wars, migration and technological sovereignty endeavours have a decisive influence on the need, form and design of communication, data processing and IT security.
In his presentation, Prof Franchi explained how technological innovations in the areas of AI, mobile edge cloud, non-terrestrial networks, joint communications & sensing, tactile internet, terahertz transmission and quantum computing will create completely new networking opportunities and thus have a decisive impact on our future private and professional lives.