Learning from the sky: autonomous flying access networks for beyond 5g
Abstract: The use of flying robots (drones) carrying radio transceiver equipment is the new promising frontier in our quest towards ever more flexible, adaptable and spectrally efficient wireless networks. Beyond obvious challenges within regulatory, control, navigation, and operational domains, the deployment of autonomous flying radio access network (Fly-RANs) also comes with a number of exciting new research problems such as the issue of autonomous real-time placement of the drones in a way that can guarantee user and network performance. We present several different scenarios of interest such as IoT monitoring and mobile broadband access. The approaches lie at the cross-roads between machine learning, signal processing and optimization. Some approaches exploit the reconstruction of 3D map from sampled radio measurements which can have application beyond the realm of communications. Early-stage practical realizations are demonstrated.
Biography: David Gesbert (IEEE Fellow) is Professor and Head of the Communication Systems Department, EURECOM. He obtained the Ph.D degree from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, France, in 1997. From 1997 to 1999 he has been with the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University. He was then a founding engineer of Iospan Wireless Inc, a Stanford spin off pioneering MIMO-OFDM (now Intel).
Before joining EURECOM in 2004, he has been with the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo as an adjunct professor. D. Gesbert has published about 270 papers and 25 patents, some of them winning the 20015 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2012 SPS Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, 2004 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2005 Young Author Best Paper Award for Signal Proc. Society journals, and paper awards at conferences 2011 IEEE SPAWC, 2004 ACM MSWiM. He has been a Technical Program Co-chair for ICC2017. He was named a Thomson-Reuters Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science.
David sits on the board of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance and is also a visiting Academic Master within the Program 111 at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Since 2015, he holds the ERC Advanced grant “PERFUME†on the topic of smart device Communications in future wireless networks (www.ercperfume.org).
Multiple Access for 5G – A New Look on NOMA
Abstract: Multiple access refers to the way radio resources are shared among different users. The multiple access techniques used in 2G and 3G cellular networks were time-division multiple access (TDMA) and code-division multiple access (CDMA), both being used in conjunction with single-carrier transmission. A big leap came out when WiFi and 4G cellular standards were developed. All of these networks adopted orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for transmission, but they differed in the way the radio resources were shared. While WiFi continued to use conventional TDMA, WiMAX used orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), and 3GPP LTE used OFDMA on the downlink and single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) on the uplink. For the development of future 5G networks, the 3GPP has already adopted OFDMA for Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) traffics, but still no decision has been made for Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) traffic, for which there are proposals based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which is widely recognized to be a promising technology. The basic principle of NOMA is to superpose user signals and make use of serial interference cancellation at the receiver. In this talk, we review current work on NOMA, discuss the related challenges, and present a new approach which relaxes the power imbalance constraint for the superposed signals and opens up new directions.
Biography: Hikmet Sari is currently Professor at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NUPT) and Chief Scientist at Sequans Communications. From 2003 to 2016, he was Professor and Head of the Telecommunications Department at Supelec. Previously, he held various research and management positions at Philips, SAT (SAGEM Group), Alcatel, Pacific Broadband Communications, and Juniper Networks. He received his Engineering Diploma and Ph.D. from the ENST, Paris, and the Habilitation degree from the University of Paris-Sud. His distinctions include the IEEE Fellow Grade and the Blondel Medal in 1995, the Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award in 2003, the Harold Sobol Award in 2012, and election to the European Academy and to the Science Academy of Turkey in 2012.
Dr. Sari has served the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) in numerous volunteer and leadership positions including Vice President – Conferences, Distinguished Lecturer, Member of the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee, Member of the Awards Committee, Member of several Technical Committees, Chair of the GITC, Chair of the Communication Theory Symposium of ICC 2002, Technical Program Chair of ICC 2004, Executive Chair of ICC 2006, General Chair of PIMRC 2010, General Chair of WCNC 2012, Executive Chair of WCNC 2014, Executive Co-Chair of ICC 2016, Executive Chair of ICC 2017, Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Associate Editor of the IEEE Communications Letters, and Guest Editor of IEEE JSAC. He also served as General Chair of ICUWB 2014, Technical Program Chair of EuCNC 2015, and General Co-Chair of ATC 2016. He is now serving on the ComSoc Board of Governors as Director for Conference Operations and also as General Co-Chair of PIMRC 2019.
Toward an Optimization-Based Wireless Network Operating System
Abstract: This talk will present an overview of our work on laying the basic design principles for a radically different approach to software-defined networking (SDN) for infrastructure-less wireless networks. Departing from well-understood approaches inspired by OpenFlow, our Wireless Network Operating System (WNOS) provides the network designer with an abstraction hiding (i) the lower-level details of the wireless protocol stack and (ii) the distributed nature of the network operations. Based on this abstract representation, the WNOS takes network control programs written on a centralized, high-level view of the network and automatically generates distributed cross-layer control programs based on distributed optimization theory that are executed by each individual node on an abstract representation of the radio hardware. We will illustrate a prototype implementation of WNOS on software-defined radio devices and test its effectiveness by considering specific cross-layer control problems. Experimental results indicate that, based on the automatically generated distributed control programs, WNOS achieves 18%, 56% and 80.4% utility gain in networks with low, medium and high levels of interference; maybe more importantly, we illustrate how the global network behavior can be controlled by modifying a few lines of code on a centralized abstraction.
Biography:Tommaso Melodia is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, where he directs the Wireless Networks and Embedded Systems Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He had previously received his M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering and Doctorate from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy, in 2001 and 2005. He is an IEEE Fellow, received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and coauthored a paper that was recognized as the “Fast Breaking Paper in the field of Computer Science” by Thomson ISI Essential Science Indicators and a paper that received the “Elsevier Top Cited Paper Award”. He is the Director of Research for the PAWR Project Office, a $100M public-private partnership to build 4 city-scale platforms for wireless research that will transform the US wireless ecosystem in years to come. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Computer Networks (Elsevier), IEEE Transactions on Biological, Molecular, and Multi-Scale Communications. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory, and local and national industrial partners. His research interests are in modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of wireless networked systems, with applications to Internet of Things, next-generation cellular networks, secure communications, underwater networks, body area networks.