IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference
25-28 May 2020 // Virtual Conference
Beyond Connectivity: What Comes After 5G

Keynotes

Young LeeYoung Lee

Head of Network Architecture, Samsung

Next Steps and Challenges of 5G Network Evolution

On April 2019, the world-first 5G network was launched commercially in South Korea. The early stage of 5G roll-out was targeted only to enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) service, and its control depended on LTE as an anchor. The real 5G will come with more enhanced features to support higher capacity, Integrated Access & Backhaul (IAB), Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC), Industrial IoT, Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and AR/VR. 5G Stand-alone (SA) deployment is a first step to show full potential of 5G as 5G SA brings the foundation for end-to-end (E2E) service pipeline across different domains –Radio Access Network (RAN), Core Network (CN), Transport Network (TN), and Data Network (DN) – to accelerate innovations of Mobile Network Operators (MNO). While innovations are important, network monetization and Operating Expenditure (OPEX)/ Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) reduction are key concerns of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to justify huge investment costs. In this regard, the benefits from virtualization, network slicing and automation are driving forces for 5G network evolution. This talk explores the technological challenges from trending areas such as virtualized RAN, E2E network slicing, and network automation. In addition, this talk presents a view on the central role of virtualization and cloudification towards technological innovation and cost reduction.

Biography: Young Lee has been in telecommunication industry over 30 years. His specialty includes network architecture, SDN/NFV, network orchestration, 5G transport and core network design, network control and management. He is currently Head of Network Architecture at Samsung Electronics Networks Business where he is leading network architecture evolution and strategy to transform various elements such as RAN, Core, Transport with AI/NFV/SDN and Orchestration into integrated solutions. At Huawei US Research center in Texas USA (2006-2019) he was Technical Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer and led several key technology concept developments, standardization and evangelization in the areas of optical control plane, path computation, transport SDN, network cloud platform and orchestration. At Ceterus Network (2001-2006), he was Co-Founder and Chief Network Architect and led a large-scale packet switching system development. At AT&T Labs (1995-2000), He was Principal Member of Technical Staff where he led various systems engineering projects including AT&T next generation router evolution, AT&T common IP/MPLS backbone routing and management, etc. At AT&T Bell Labs (1987-1995), he was Member of Technical Staff and led several routing and switching system engineering projects and network traffic management system development. He received B.A. in Applied Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley (1986), M.S. in Operations Research from Stanford University (1987), and Ph.D. in Decision Science and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1996) via AT&T Bell Labs’ doctoral support program.

Date and Time : 5/26/2020 09:20 to 10:00

Kang-Won LeeKang-Won Lee

Vice President and Head of Cloud Labs of SK Telecom

Challenges and Opportunities of 5G Mobile Edge Cloud

The 5G services require a network with “high bandwidth and ultra-low latency.” High bandwidth can be enabled by wider frequency bands. To achieve ultra-low latency, however, network operators have come up with the concept of “mobile edge.” By leveraging mobile edge, we can deliver novel 5G applications that can benefit from sub 10msec latency, such as cloud XR, cloud gaming, connected cars, cloud robots.

While providing ultra-low latency itself is useful, this does not fully justify the cost of deployment of numerous edge sites. In fact, it is not difficult to see mobile edge provides a couple of additional benefits: (1) huge volumes of data (that may be generated by, for example, connected cars) can be processed at the edge instead of sending them to a remote data center, which is extremely costly; (2) mission-critical and sensitive data from a smart factory or hospital can be processed at the edge without leaving the site. By enabling edge data processing and local security, mobile edge provides a unique opportunity for mobile service providers to bring new values to its B2C and B2B customers.

In this keynote, I propose that mobile edge should be “programmable” and “cloud native.” This does not mean just running a few VMs at the edge site. At SKT we are developing its mobile edge as a fully functioning cloud. SKT’s MEC or “mobile edge cloud” will provide virtualized infrastructure with Kubernetes, serverless, and service mesh support. We are also pairing our MEC with public clouds so that our users have options to quickly build new applications using widely understood cloud APIs and services. In addition, we will provide our unique service assets, such as telco APIs, natural language processing, real-time data processing, etc. “as a service” to developers so they can quickly build something that was truly not possible before.

I will conclude this talk by presenting several early use cases that we are developing on 5G MEC with our partners.

Biography: As Vice President and Head of Cloud Labs of SK Telecom, Dr. Kang-Won Lee has been leading the research and development of cloud technologies to expand the company’s 5G service portfolio and strengthen its leadership. He is currently developing innovative technologies aimed at enhancing customer’s experience and value. They include 5G MEC, telco cloud infrastructure to provide next-generation 5G services, such as cloud gaming, autonomous driving or 5G robots. Before joining SK Telecom, he worked at IBM Watson Research Center in New York for 14 years leading a number of R&D projects as Research Manager, and successfully applied his R&D results to IBM’s main products, such as Informix and Tivoli. He received his bachelor and master’s degrees from Seoul National University and a doctor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (UIUC).

Date and Time : 5/26/2020 10:00 to 10:40

Gerhard Fettweis

Vodafone Chair Professor, Technische Universität Dresden

6G – A Step Beyond Stretching 5G

The initial vision of cellular communications was to deliver ubiquitous voice communications to anyone anywhere. However, only 2G delivered this promise. It also initiated the appetite for cellular data, for which 3G was designed. However we needed 4G to deliver energy efficient broadband cellular data. With 5G the promise is to start the Tactile Internet, controlling real and virtual objects in real-time via cellular. It seems, that we need to stretch 5G to the next step, 6G. We seem to need 2 generations to bring a new service to fruition, with odd generations initiating and even ones making it happen. The physical air interface also has 2 generations of technology ripening, however even ones initiating it and odd completing it (CDMA: 2G and 3G, OFDM: 4G and 5G). If generations stay the same, we are ready for a revolution in air interface to happen with 6G, to “stretch the goals of 5” such that 6G can deliver the promises made. However, here we will also show new opportunities ahead, going far beyond stretching goals, as e.g. increasing data rate and reducing latency. With some first experimental results, this talk shall deliver a vision as well as some validation of what could become possible. In particular we will discuss using the physical layer also for sensing, expanding the current focus of cellular one big step forward. Also, the current cellular network comprising 2 basic functions, i.e. service delivery via layer 1-7, and network management, must be expanded by adding a third layer for delivering integrity. Finally, today’s data traffic is dominated by video delivery. Will this stay that way?

Biography: Gerhard P. Fettweis, F’09, earned a Ph.D. under H. Meyr at RWTH Aachen. After a postdoc at IBM Research, San Jose, he joined TCSI, Berkeley. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden. Since 2018 he heads the Barkhausen Institute. 2019 he was elected into the DFG Senate. He researches wireless transmission and chip design, and coordinates e.g. the 5GLab Germany, has spun-out 17 startups, and is member the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”, and German Academy of Engineering “acatech”.

Date and Time : 5/27/2020 09:10 to 9:50

Jin-hyo ParkJIANMIN LU 

Executive Director, Huawei Wireless Technology Lab

INTO THE FUTURE WIRELESS

The 5G has already been commercially deployed since last year and people, especially Korean customers, enjoy the benefit of 2C business. Although the standard of 3GPP R16 will be released shortly in 2020 and this will be the full formal 5G, i.e. IMT2020 compliant, the research and standard to evolve 5G will not stop. While 5G is opening the door of digital transformation of many aspects of our life, industry, business and even the whole society, the future of wireless is yet to be discovered. Since the first generation of mobile technology, the mobile industry has experienced significant growth driven by ‘subscription dividend’ and ‘traffic dividend’. The next dividend is believed to be the “connection dividend” or even “intelligence dividend”. In addition, sensing (including accurate positioning, imaging etc.) will be a novel capability of future network, enabling “everything sensing”, “everything connected” and “everything intelligent”. On the other hand, the sheer number of connected devices and objects will not only create unprecedented growth of data traffic and massive connections, but also create a substantial increase in energy consumption across all parts of the network. Energy efficiency in wireless networks is now a growing concern for network operators to not only reduce the network operation costs, but also as a social obligation, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, higher frequency (mmWave and THz) band provides abundant spectrum for Tbps data rate, while it also brings about paradigm shift in the whole system design. The research challenges and technology breakthroughs required to deliver the vision for future wireless will be presented in this talk.

Biography: Jianmin Lu joined the Huawei Technologies in 1999. During the last two decades, he conducted various researches on wireless communications especially on physic layer and MAC layer and developed 3G, 4G and 5G products. He received more than 50 patents during the research. He was deeply involved in 3GPP2 (EVDO/UMB), WiMAX/802.16m and 3GPP (LTE/NR) standardization and contributed several key technologies such as flexible radio frame structure, radio resource management and MIMO. His current research interest is in the area of signal processing, protocol and networking for the next generation wireless communication. He is currently Executive Director of Huawei Wireless Technology Lab.

Date and Time : 5/27/2020 09:50 to 10:30

Ness B. ShroffNess B. Shroff

Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and Communications

Chaired Professor of ECE and CSE, Ohio State University

A Fresh Look at an Old Problem: Network Utility Maximization—Convergence, Delay, and Complexity

Network Utility Maximization has been studied for resource allocation problems in communication networks for nearly two decades. Nonetheless, a major challenge that continues to remain open is how to develop a distributed congestion control and routing algorithm that can simultaneously provide utility optimality, fast convergence speed, and low delay. To address this challenge we take a fresh perspective on this old problem and develop a new algorithm that offers the fastest known convergence speed, vanishing utility optimality gap with finite queue length, and low routing complexity.

Our key contributions in this work are: i) the design of a new joint congestion control and routing algorithm based on a type of inexact Uzawa method in the Alternating Directional Method of Multiplier; ii) a new theoretical path to prove global and linear convergence rate without requiring the full rank assumption of the constraint matrix; and iii) a clear path for implementing the proposed method in a fully distributed fashion.

Biography: Ness Shroff received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1994. He joined Purdue University immediately thereafter as an Assistant Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At Purdue, he became a Full Professor of ECE and the director of a university-wide center on wireless systems and applications in 2004. In 2007, he joined The Ohio State University, where he holds the Ohio Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in networking and communications, in the departments of ECE and CSE. He holds or has held visiting (chaired) professor positions at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China, and IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India. He has received numerous best paper awards for his research and is listed in Thomson Reuters’ on The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds, and has been noted as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters in 2014 and 2015. He currently serves as the steering committee chair for ACM Mobihoc and Editor at Large of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.  He received the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award for seminal contributions to scheduling and resource allocation in wireless networks.

Date and Time : 5/28/2020 09:00 to 9:40

Woo-Jin Byun

Assistant Vice President, Radio Satellite Research Division, ETRI

Toward One Network Era: Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Communication

With the development of mobile communication technology, wireless data transmission speed is increasing, but the communication range is narrowing. In particular, millimeter wave 5G is expected to provide Gbps data services mainly in the hot spot area. Despite the development of mobile communication networks, there are still many coverage holes which mobile communication cannot provide data services. Covering all these shaded areas with a mobile communication network would
be expensive. Moreover, people want to be provided with high-quality data services on airplanes and cruise ships. To this end, satellite and terrestrial communication networks are being integrated. Satellites have traditionally served to provide telecommunications services to disaster areas where terrestrial networks have collapsed. In addition, it has been providing broadcasting and communication services to marine areas and island-mountainous areas that do not reach the ground network. Terrestrial-Satellite communication network will be able to provide much higher quality
services.
In this talk, I would like to point out the development direction of terrestrial-satellite communication technology. In addition, the main technologies in the field of terrestrial-satellite communication required for the 5G + / 6G era will be explained.

Biography: Dr. Woo-Jin Byun received Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, (KAIST) Daejeon, Korea, in 2000. In 1999, he joined Samsung Electro- Mechanics Company, Suwon, Korea, where he developed mobile communication devices such as power amplifiers and radio modules from 1999 to 2004. Since 2004, he has been a member of researchers in ETRI. He has received best paper award at ETRI Journal, best researcher from KIEES and certificate of the Minister of Science and ICT (Korea Government). He serves as a member of Editorial Committee at ETRI Journal. He was with the ATHENA group at Georgia Institute of Technology as a visiting scholar from 2015 to 2016. He is currently serving as Assistant Vice President for Radio Satellite Research Division at ETRI.

Date and Time : 5/28/2020 09:40 to 10:20

Patrons