Bell Labs, the research & development division of Lucent Technologies, will set up its research unit in Bangalore.

This will be its eleventh location across the globe and will focus on developing state-of-the-art software systems for enabling the world's leading wireline and wireless service providers to deploy and manage high-speed, highly reliable networks.

Due to the explosive growth that the communications industry has witnessed in the past few years, telecom service providers in the region face unique challenges.

The Bangalore centre will partner closely with Lucent's customers as they deploy new technologies such as cellular data, and devise innovative solutions to their most challenging problems.

The centre will be led by Rajeev Rastogi as the Executive Director of Bell Labs Research, India. Rastogi is a Bell Labs Fellow and is active in the field of databases. The centre is expected to start with around 10 researchers.

The mission of Bell Labs Research, India will be to conduct fundamental research in scientific fields related to computing and communications software and to create the underlying technology innovations that will enable telecom service providers to deploy and manage high-speed, highly reliable networks. It will will focus extensively on computer algorithms, networking, network management and data management.

The Bangalore unit will also work extensively on Operation Support Systems (OSS) for VoIP networks. The goal of this project will be to develop OSS technologies that will enable service providers to offer carrier-grade voice and other services such as IP video over an IP packet infrastructure.

As part of the project, the labs will focus on design and planning which will involve traffic engineering of the core network, and determining optimal locations for VoIP elements like softswitches and media gateways so that the network can scale to handle large call volumes.