Research themes

The NTRC is led by a team of industry academics with internationally recognised experience in telecoms innovation. Our extensive research portfolio is focused on future proofing Australia’s emergency communications infrastructure for the good of the Australian people, businesses and the nation as a whole.

NTRC research is split into three research themes:

Tall metal transmission tower with a spiral safety ladder, silhouetted against a clear blue sky. Surrounding trees add a sense of scale.

Foundations

  • Network resilience: Exploring resilience capabilities beyond 5G, with a focus on 6G candidate technologies and other emerging innovations.
  • Current specifications: Building more resilient telecom networks by understanding current specifications and their gaps.
  • Sovereign functions: Investigating resilience strategies for sovereign functions, identifying gaps and risks that drive large-scale outages, and exploring digital twin technology to simulate failure scenarios. 
A group of people in a workshop setting, focused on a speaker near a screen displaying graphs and data. The atmosphere is professional and engaged.

Near-term impact

  • Coverage maps: Developing techniques to calculate and report emergency call coverage across device types and use cases.
  • Future 000 and ECP: Exploring the vision for a next-generation emergency call person (ECP) and global trends in the evolution of emergency call centres.
    • Real-time text (RTT): Investigating the technical and regulatory requirements to enable RTT.
    • Multimedia: Examining the technical and operational considerations required to integrate multimedia into 000 emergency call flows.
  • Wilting: Developing an optimised wilting method to replace the current failover mechanism.
  • LEOSat: Reviewing LEOSat emergency call handling and identifying optimal fallback options when multiple network paths are available. 
  • Register: Creating a comprehensive register and taxonomy to identify technical and regulatory compliance of devices and network equipment. 
A group of people wearing high-visibility vests stands near a large industrial building and a tall metal structure, with a partly cloudy sky above.

Long-term exploration

Future NTRC research will be aligned to the evolving needs of our industry partners. Areas of interest include, but aren’t limited to:

  • Temporary roaming
  • VoWiFi 
  • 4G Shutdown 
  • Information sharing 
  • UE relay