Workshops

Half-day

Full-day

HALF DAY WORKSHOPS

WA 1: 5GArch: Workshop on 5G architecture

Monday 9 March 9:00 – 12:30

Organizers
  • Mehdi Bennis, Centre of Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Afef Feki, France Research Center, Huawei Technologies, France
  • Berna Sayrac, Orange Labs, France
  • Federico Boccardi, Vodafone Group, United Kingdom
  • Mischa Dohler, King's College London, United Kingdom
 
Scope
The goal of this workshop is to expose latest insights from industry and academia on 5G architecture design, a quickly growing topic. Indeed, over the last couple of years different trends emerged calling for a rethinking of the current 4G architecture, which does not scale to the relentless traffic demand, signaling overhead, etc. In particular, from a technology perspective, the emergence of virtualization at the core network and (partly) at the radio access network is seen as crucial going beyond 4G networks. Also the increase in small cell base station density and the number of carrier components is set to follow its course spanning both microwave and milimeterwave spectrum. The idea of separation between data and control (a.k.a. Phantom Cell-like) and between downlink and uplink due to traffic asymmetry imbalance is gaining significant grounds. In addition, the use of distributed content caching in different parts of the network (EPC/RAN/edge) is considered as one of the most disruptive paradigms in 5G from both an architectural and edge intelligence point of view. From a service perspective, the emerging importance of new services requiring a very low latency or/and a very high reliability, coupled with the prevalence of internet-of-things services which cannot be enabled by today's architecture, are crucial. All these aspects mandate a clean-slate approach to tackling the increasingly complex problems.
 
For more information visit: http://www.ctr.kcl.ac.uk/5GArch
 

WA 2: Workshop on Energy Efficiency in the Internet of Things, and Internet of Things for Energy Efficiency

Monday 9 March 14:00 – 17:30

Organizers
  • Antonio J. Jara, HES-SO, Switzerland
  • Gianluca A. Rizzo, HES SO Valais, Switzerland
  • Yann Bocchi, Haute Ecole Specialisee de Suisse Occidentale, Switzerland
Scope
The evolution of ICT has led to the diffusion of wireless personal devices, such as smart mobile phones, personal computers and wearable devices, designed to operate over the Internet. This, together with the exponential growth of the number of interconnected devices is leading towards the commonly called Internet of Things (IoT). Presently, a large share of the total energy consumption of the Internet takes place at the edge. This share is increasing with the progressive deployment of the IoT, which is reshaping the edge of the network, and which in the near future is bound to generate the large majority of traffic on the Internet. Though usually small and not power hungry, the sheer number of the devices composing the IoT will make them the highest contributors to total energy consumption in the ICT sector. For meeting the challenge of a greener Internet, therefore, a greener IoT is fundamental. This involves elaboration of new approaches at the device level (energy efficient, energy proportional devices) as well as at the system level (algorithms for energy efficient network services as well as application layers services provisioning). On the other side, the pervasiveness of sensing and computing capabilities in IoT is enabling a wealth of new applications for energy efficient management in almost all domains of human activity, from transportations to lighting, from waste management to the smart grid.

WA 5: Self-Organizing Heterogeneous Networks

Monday 9 March  9:00 – 12:30

Organizers
  • Mugen Peng, Beijing University of posts & Telecommunications, P.R. China
  • Jingxian Wu, University of Arkansas, USA
  • Zhiguo Ding, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
 
Scope
With the rapid development of mobile internet and internet of things (IoTs), the demands for high speed data applications, such as high-quality wireless video streaming, social networking and machine-to-machine communication, have been growing exponentially recently. It is envisioned that the total daily mobile traffic in the representative Western European countries will grow 67 times from 186 terabyte (TB) to 12540 TB from 2010 to 2020, and the total worldwide mobile traffic of 351 exabyte (EB) in 2025 represents a 174% increase compared with 2020. The fifth generation (5G) system deployed initially in 2020 is expected to provide about 1000 times higher wireless area capacity and save up to 90% of energy consumption per service as compared with the current 4G system. Furthermore, more than 1000 Gbit/s/km2 area spectral capacity in dense urban environments, 10 times higher battery life time of connected devices, and 5 times reduced end-to-end (E2E) latency are expected in 5G systems. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are proposed and investigated by both the academia and industry as standardized for 5G systems to overlay low power nodes within a macro scenario to improve the capacity and extend the coverage. Actually, deploying and operating the HetNet based 5G system is an extremely complicated task and needs to consider many factors, such as planning, dimensioning, installation, testing, pre-launch optimization, post-launch optimization, performance monitoring, failure mitigation, and failure correction. All those activities are labor-intensive, costly and prone to errors, and any slight oversight may result in customers' dissatisfaction and a significant loss of revenue. To minimize human intervention and maximize efficiency in planning, deployment, and maintenance activities, self-organizing HetNets (So-HetNets) have been defined in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) Release 10. More precisely, the support for So-HetNets paradigm has been translated into the underlined functionalities, interfaces, and procedures during the standardization processes of LTE-Advanced and future 5G systems in 3GPP. The principal objective of introducing So-HetNets is to substantially reduce operational capital expenditure (O/CAPEX) by diminishing human involvement in network operational tasks and optimizing network capacity, coverage and service quality. The general idea of So-HetNets is to integrate network planning, configuration, and optimization into a unified automatic process requiring minimal manual intervention. So-HetNets allow the operators to streamline their operations, not only reducing the complexity of managing co-channel interference in HetNet, but also saving operational costs to all macro and heterogeneous communication entities, to harmonize the whole network management approach and improve the overall operational efficiency. Meanwhile, the availability of solutions for So-HetNets leads to identification of more powerful optimization strategies able to suppress co-channel interferences and improve energy efficiency performance. Inspired by the aforementioned attractive features and potential advantages of So-HetNets, their development and deployment have been gaining momentum in the wireless industry and academia during the past few years. It has also attracted tremendous attention from the 3GPP standardizations. However, So-HetNets also comes with their own challenges, and there are innovative technical issues that still need to be addressed for successful rollout and operation on these networks.

For more information visit:  https://sites.google.com/site/SoHetNets2015/

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS

WA 3: Next Generation WiFi Technology

Monday 9 March  9:00 – 17:30

Organizers
  • Der Jiunn Deng, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan
  • Chih-Cheng Tseng, National Ilan University, Taiwan
  • Mohammed Atiquzzaman, University of Oklahoma, USA
  • Alexey Vinel, Halmstad University, Sweden
 
Scope
Among all the wireless network technologies developed in the past two decades, none was so successful in extending local area networks to wireless nodes than those derived from IEEE 802.11. WiFi have experienced tremendous growth with the proliferation of WiFi devices in the last ten years. Nowadays, WiFi devices are currently being deployed in diverse environments. These environments are characterized by the existence of many access points (AP) and mobile nodes in geographically limited areas. Increased interference from neighboring devices and severe collisions from channel contention in dense environments give rise to network performance degradation. In addition, WiFi devices are increasingly required to support a variety of applications such as voice, video, cloud access, and traffic offloading. When cellular companies are plan to kick off LTE‐A service and offering up to 1 gigabit per second data rate in the next few years, WiFi also need to be upgraded to support increasing demands of network performance in delivering emerging applications, including improved power consumption for battery‐operated devices. The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic and industrial researchers in an effort to identify and discuss the major technical challenges and recent results related to emerging technologies for next generation WiFi.

For more information visit: http://djdeng.ncue.edu.tw/NGWiFi2015.html
 
 

WA 4: International Workshop on Smart Spectrum

Monday 9 March  9:00 – 17:30

Organizers
  • Kenta Umebayashi, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan
  • Takeo Fujii, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan
 
Scope
An essential feature of future wireless communications is efficient, flexible and dynamic spectrum utilization. In recent years, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) based on cognitive radio techniques has been investigated in order to achieve more efficient spectrum utilization. However, there are several important issues related to cognitive radio based wireless systems. For example, accurate spectrum sensing which is necessary for opportunistical spectrum access can be very challenging to realize without prohibitively high implementation costs. A wireless network taking advantage of spectrum measurement is one of the promising approaches capable of resolving the above issues and delivering such smart spectrum utilization. By analyzing real world spectrum utilization it is possible to obtain information on actual spectrum utilization statistics which can be used to develop spectrum usage models that can enhance the performance of estimating and predicting the spectrum status as well as improving spectrum resource management, sharin and allocation in future wireless networks. As opposed to conventional DSA methodology which also aims to improve the overall spectrum utilization, the workshop focuses on a newer subset of techniques which have not been investigated comprehensively so far. Specifically, we will discuss spectrum measurement techniques, statistical usage modeling and model estimation as well as their applications in future spectrum access, sharing and management techniques.
For more information visit: http://wcnc2015.smartspectrum.net/

WA 6: 2nd International Workshop on Device-to-Device and Public Safety Communications

Monday 9 March  9:00 – 17:30

Organizers
  • Ismail Guvenc, Florida International University, USA
  • Walid Saad, Virginia Tech, USA
  • Murat Yuksel, University of Nevada - Reno, USA
  • Luca Rose, Huawei FRC, France
  • Abolfazl Mehbodniya, Tohoku University, Japan
 
Scope
Device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaid on wireless cellular networks is viewed as a key technology for providing seamless, high quality wireless access in next-generation wireless systems. The D2D concept is built around the idea of allowing the wireless devices to communicate with one another via direct D2D links over both the licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Unlike traditional short-range D2D technologies such as Bluetooth or Zigbee, D2D over cellular is expected to provide high capacity and guaranteed QoS over long ranges. D2D is also expected to lead to novel wireless applications such as proximity services and public safety communications. Indeed, D2D is seen as a key feature of 5G wireless systems. However, reaping the benefits of D2D requires handling several challenges such as interference management, self-organization, network discovery, and resource allocation, among others. The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to D2D and public safety communications.

For more information visit: http://wdpc.fiu.edu/
 

WA 7: The 8th International WDN Workshop on Cooperative and Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Monday 9 March  9:00 – 17:30

Organizers
  • Jessica Oueis, CEA-LETI & University of Grenoble, France
  • Kei Sakaguchi, Osaka University & Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
  • Emilio Calvanese Strinati, CEA-LETI, France
  • Thomas Haustein, Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, Germany
 
Scope
The enormous increase in the mobile connected equipment and mobile subscribers number, in addition to the emergence of data-centric standards such as 3GPP's LTE-A raises an urgent call to find sustainable solution that permits to fulfil data rate, spectrum, and coverage requirements. However, resources are scarce and the frequency spectrum availability is limited. To address these issues, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission/reception and heterogeneous networks (HetNet) play a key role for future cellular networks. In the HetNet, low power base stations of smaller coverage are deployed inside the conventional macrocells for traffic offloading. Furthermore, base stations clustering and coordination has been studied as a mean for improving the network energy efficiency, users' quality of experience, and for delivering cloud services by pooling computational and communication resources. Regarding CoMP, HetNet, beside researches activities in academia, there are considerable industry-wide standardization efforts in 3GPP RAN working groups and IEEE. While industry efforts have also targeted efficient operation of CoMP and HetNet, fundamental research on the cost-performance tradeoffs of each of these deployments are certainly desirable for both academia and industry. The main objective of the workshop is to offer an opportunity for academic and industrial researches for spreading and sharing the latest results and understanding for making communication networks more energy efficient and more area spectrally efficient.