Since its beginning, SPSC Lab has closely collaborated with FTW and in 2008 Graz University of Technology became a strategic partner holding shares of the FTW operations company. In 2010, a branch office of FTW has been opened in the premises of the SPSC Lab that further strengthens the ties between the two institutions and allows new cooperations with university institutes and with regional industrial partners from the three major application fields, i.e., telecommunications, transport, and energy. The 7 strategic research topics of FTW are

• Channel Characterization
• Cross-Layer Transceiver Design
• Cooperative Communication
• Network Monitoring
• Quality in Communication Ecosystems
• Information Exploitation
• Context-Aware Interfaces and Systems

which are organized into 4 research areas:

• Signal & Information Processing
• Communication Networks
• Networked Services
• User-Centered Interaction & Communication Economics