Tutorials

PROGRAM

TA1 - TA5: Sunday Morning, 3 April 2016, 09:00 – 12:30

  

TA1: Emerging Concepts and Technologies towards 5G+ Wireless Networks

Halim Yanikomeroglu, Carleton University, Canada

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TA2: Green Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Muhammad Ismail, Texas A and M University, Qatar 
Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir, Carleton University, Canada
Erchin Serpedin, Texas A and M University, College Station, US
Khalid A. Qaraqe, Texas A and M University, Qatar 

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TA3: MIMO for 5G Networks: Algorithmic Cross-layer Design and Performance Analysis

Mérouane Debbah, Huawei, France and CentraleSupélec, France
Mohamad Assaad, CentraleSupélec, France

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TA4: Socially Enabled Wireless Networks

Kwang-Cheng Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

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TA5: Title Visible Light Communications and Networking

Hany Elgala, State University of New York at Albany, US

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TP1 - TP5: Sunday Afternoon, 3 April 2016, 14:00 – 17:30

 

TP1: Designing 5G Networks: an Energy Efficient Perspective

Fabrizio Granelli, University of Trento, Canada
Marco Di Renzo, CNRS – SUPELEC – Univ. Paris-Sud, France
Christos Verikoukis, Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia, Spain
Abbas Jamalipour, University of Sydney, Australia 

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TP2: The Road to 5G: Small Cells, Context-Awareness, and Ultra Dense Networks

Mehdi Bennis, University of Oulu, Finland

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TP3: Greening the Lasthop Access

Nirwan Ansari, New Jersey Institute of Technology, US

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TP4: Towards the Vehicular Cloud: From Connected Cars to Smart Cities

Falko Dressler, University of Paderborn, Germany

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TP5: Internet of Things: Enablers, Trends, and Challenges

Fethi Filali, Qatar Mobility Innovations Center, Qatar

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TUTORIALS 

TA1: Emerging Concepts and Technologies towards 5G+ Wireless Networks

Abstract:
Since the development of 4G LTE standards around 2010, the research communities both in academia and industry have been brainstorming to predict the use cases and scenarios around 2020, to determine the corresponding technical requirements, and to develop the enabling technologies, protocols, and network architectures towards the next-generation (5G) wireless standardization.
 
This exploratory phase is winding down as the 5G standardization phase approaches. The first wave of 5G standards are expected to be developed during the 2017-18 timeframe, to be approved by ITU during the 2019-2020 timeframe, and to become operational in the early 2020s. As such, it is time to reinitiate a similar brainstorming endeavour towards the beyond-5G wireless networks; we refer to such networks as 5G+ in order to include the evolution of the 5G standards in 2020s and to perform the groundwork for those to be developed towards 2030.
 
The overall goal of the tutorial is to identify
  • the emerging concepts and technologies, and
  • the necessary analytical tools to study them (such as optimization, game theory, dynamic feedback control, and artificial intelligence).
Towards that end, a number of important components will be presented in the single coherent framework of 5G cellular networks with a “systems” scope and approach.
In the first part of this tutorial (1.5 hours), the following topics will be covered:
  • Fundamental dynamics of cellular and wireless communications
  • 3GPP operation
  • Key technologies in LTE-Advanced (R10)
  • Highlights of 3GPP Releases 11, 12, 13, and 14
  • Challenges and opportunities as we move forward
  • Revisiting the theoretical basics: What we know and what we don’t know
  • Enabling technologies in layer-1 and layer-2 as well in the network architecture
  • Bottleneck problems in the beyond-2020 wireless networks
In the second part of the tutorial (1.5 hours), the potential research directions towards coping with the bottleneck problems, especially in the context of radio access network (RAN), resource allocation, layers 1, 2, and 3, will be discussed; the underlying mathematical tools will also be highlighted:
  • Cognitive radio & spectrum usage
  • Advances in PHY
  • Noncoherent communications
  • HetHetNets (heterogeneous traffic in heterogeneous networks)
    • 5G+ traffic models
    • Intercell load coordination (ICLC)
    • Layer 8: User-in-the-Loop (demand shaping in space and time)
    • Drone-BSs
  • New frontiers in resource allocation
  • Interdisciplinary approaches in decision making
  • Robust algorithms and protocols
In the absence of a clear technology roadmap for the 2020-2030 timeframe, the tutorial has, to a certain extent, an exploratory view point to stimulate further thinking and creativity. We are certainly at the dawn of a new era in wireless research and innovation; the next twenty years will be very interesting.
 
Presenter:
Halim Yanikomeroglu was born in Giresun, Turkey, in 1968. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1990, and the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (now ECE) and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1992 and 1998, respectively.
During 1993–1994, he was with the R&D Group of Marconi Kominikasyon A.S., Ankara, Turkey. Since 1998 he has been with the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is now a Full Professor. His research interests cover many aspects of wireless technologies with a special emphasis on cellular networks. He coauthored about 80 IEEE journal papers, and has given a high number of tutorials and invited talks on wireless technologies in the leading international conferences. In recent years, his research has been funded by Huawei, Blackberry, Samsung, Telus, Allen Vanguard, DragonWave, Communications Research Centre of Canada (CRC), and Nortel. This collaborative research resulted in about 25 patents (granted and applied). Dr. Yanikomeroglu has been involved in the organization of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) from its inception, including serving as Steering Committee Member as well as the Technical Program Chair or Co-Chair of WCNC 2004 (Atlanta), WCNC 2008 (Las Vegas), and WCNC 2014 (Istanbul). He was the General Co-Chair of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference Fall 2010 held in Ottawa. He has served in the editorial boards of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, and IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS. He was the Chair of the IEEE’s Technical Committee on Personal Communications (now called Wireless Technical Committee). He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communications Society as well as the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
 
Dr. Yanikomeroglu is a recipient of the IEEE Ottawa Section Outstanding Educator Award in 2014, Carleton University Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award in 2010, the Carleton University Graduate Students Association Excellence Award in Graduate Teaching in 2010, and the Carleton University Research Achievement Award in 2009. Dr. Yanikomeroglu spent the 2011–2012 academic year at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey, as a Visiting Professor. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario, Canada.


TA2: Green Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

 Abstract:
This tutorial focuses on the emerging research topic “green (energy efficient) wireless networks” that has drawn huge attention recently from both academia and industry. This topic is highly motivated due to important environmental, financial, and quality-of-experience (QoE) considerations. In this tutorial, we mainly focus on energy efficient techniques in base stations (BSs) and mobile terminals (MTs) as they constitute the major sources of energy consumption in wireless access networks, from the operator and user perspectives. Furthermore, this tutorial targets the heterogeneous nature of the wireless communication medium, and therefore, the tutorial is entitled “Green Heterogeneous Wireless Networks”. The wireless communication medium has become a heterogeneous environment with overlapped coverages due to the co-existence of different cells (macro, micro, pico, and femto), networks (cellular networks, wireless local areas networks, wireless metropolitan area networks), and technologies (radio frequency, device-to-device (D2D), and visible light communications (VLC)). In such a networking environment, MTs are equipped with multiple radio interfaces and enjoy a multi-homing capability. This tutorial mainly focuses on promoting energy efficiency in wireless networks through multi-homing resource allocation, exploiting network cooperation, integrating different and new network technologies (radio frequency and VLC), and integrating new device centric communication paradigms such as Ds2D communications. This tutorial is part of the authors most recent research on green heterogeneous networks including two research monographs and numerous IEEE journal and conference publications.

The table of contents of this tutorial is structured as follows:
Part I: Introduction - Green Networks (30 minutes)
(1.1) Introduction - The Need for Green Communications
(1.2) Modeling of Energy Efficiency in Wireless Networks
(1.3) Traffic Modeling and Performance Metrics
(1.4) Green Solutions at Low and/or Bursty Call Traffic Load
(1.5) Green Solutions at High and/or Continuous Call Traffic Load Part II: Green Multi-homing Resource Allocation (75 minutes)
(2.1) Introduction - The Heterogeneous Wireless Medium
(2.2) Green Multi-homing Resource Allocation
(2.3) Challenging Issues
(2.4) Incentives for Green Downlink Multi-homing
(2.5) VLC-Femto Cell Multi-homing Solution
(2.6) Fairness in Green Uplink Multi-homing Part III: Network Management Solutions (75 minutes)
(3.1) Dynamic Planning with Balanced Energy Efficiency: Two-timescale Decision Strategy
(3.2) Greening the Edges: Energy Efficient Cell-on-Edge Deployment
(3.3) D2D Communications for Green Networks: Energy Consumption Analysis of Hierarchical HetNet
(3.4) Energy Efficient Content Access Approaches - Green Terminals: Devices-to-device (Ds2D) communications Conclusions and Future Research
(4.1) Concluding Remarks
(4.2) The Road Ahead
 
Presenters:
Muhammad Ismail (S’10-M’13) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering (electronics and communications) from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2013. He is an Assistant Research Scientist with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, Qatar. His research interests include distributed resource allocation, green wireless networks, cooperative networking, smart grid, and biomedical signal processing. He is a co-author of two research monographs and a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at IEEE ICC 2014, IEEE Globecom 2014, and SGRE 2015. Dr. Ismail served as a TPC Member for ICWMC 2010- 2014 and IEEE ICC 2014 and 2015. He served as a Web Chair for the IEEE INFOCOM 2014 Organizing Committee. He has been an Associate Editor at IET Communications since Dec. 2014 and he joined the International Journal on Advances in Networks and Services Editorial Board in January 2012. He was an Editorial Assistant of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY in the period January 2011 to July 2013. He has been a Technical Reviewer for several IEEE conferences and journals.

 
Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir (M’04) is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University, Canada, since Oct. 2015. He has been an Assistant Research Scientist with the Wireless Research Lab, Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), Doha, Qatar, since July 2012. Previously, from November 2009 to June 2012, he was a Research Fellow with the Communication Theory Lab, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He received PhD degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK in 2010. His research interests include design and deployment of diverse wireless communication systems including hyper-dense heterogeneous small-cell networks with particular focus on traffic offloading/backhauling techniques and Green communications. He is a co-author of two research monographs. He has published more than 75 technical journal and conference papers and has contributed to 6 books, all in well reputed venues. Most of his research has been sponsored by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) and national industrial partners. Dr. Shakir has been/is giving tutorials on emerging wireless systems at IEEE flagship conferences including IEEE ICC 2014, Sydney and IEEI Globecom 2014, Austin. He has been a member of TPC of several IEEE flagship conferences. He is the founder of IEEE Workshop BackNets 2015. He is the technical Chair of Crowncom 2015 and several special sessions/workshops. He is serving as a Lead Guest Editor for special issues in IEEE Comm Mag and IEEE Wireless Comm Mag. Currently, he has been serving as Secretary to the IEEE DySPAN 1900.7. He is an active member of IEEE and IEEE Standard Association.

 
Erchin Serpedin (F’13) is a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. He received the specialization degree in signal processing and transmission of information from Ecole Superieure D’Electricite (SUPELEC), Paris, France, in 1992, the M.Sc. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, in January 1999. Dr. Serpedin is the author of 2 research monographs, 1 textbook, 9 book chapters, 110 journal papers, and 180 conference papers. His research interests include signal processing, biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, and machine learning. Dr. Serpedin is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE and as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, an online journal edited by Springer. He served as an Associate Editor of a dozen of journals, such as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, Signal Processing (Elsevier), Physical Communications (Elsevier), EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, and as a Technical Chair for five major conferences. He was a recipient of numerous awards and research grants.
  
 
Khalid A. Qaraqe (M’97, SM’00) was born in Bethlehem. Dr Qaraqe received the B.S. degree in EE from the University of Technology, in 1986, with honors. He received the M.S. degree in EE from the University of Jordan, Jordan, in 1989, and he earned his Ph.D. degree in EE from Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, in 1997. From 1989 to 2004 Dr Qaraqe has held a variety positions in many companies and he has over 12 years of experience in the telecommunication industry. Dr. Qaraqe has worked for Qualcomm, Enad Design Systems, Cadence Design Systems/Tality Corporation, STC, SBC and Ericsson. He has worked on numerous GSM, CDMA, WCDMA projects and has experience in product development, design, deployments, testing and integration. Dr. Qaraqe joined the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Texas A&M University at Qatar, in July 2004, where he is now a professor. Dr. Khalid Qaraqe has authored or co authored more than 150 journal articles, conference papers, and scientific reports, and has been awarded one U.S. patent, as well as numerous honors for his research, leadership and teaching. Dr. Qaraqe research interests include communication theory and its application to design and performance, analysis of cellular systems and indoor communication systems. Particular interests are in mobile networks, broadband wireless access, cooperative networks, cognitive radio, diversity techniques and beyond 4G systems.
 
 

TA3: MIMO for 5G Networks: Algorithmic Cross-layer Design and Performance Analysis

 Abstract:
Wireless communications are fast evolving in order to meet the rapid growth in Internet and multimedia services, as well as the emergence of new domains in the market of the wireless communications, such as social behavior, digital television and cognitive sciences. The next generation of cellular networks (5G) is expected to support 1000-fold increases in traffic demand. MIMO is one of the key techniques of the 5G emerging technology to accommodate such a demand. Most of the prior research work on MIMO is based solely on the physical layer considerations and tend to ignore the time varying and bursty nature of the multimedia traffic. This results clearly in an underutilization of the resources of the network since the physical resources may be allocated to a user having small number of bits in the buffer. The design of advanced MIMO schemes taking into account the traffic patterns is hence gaining interest in order to support the large amount of traffic demand. The aforementioned design is challenging since it asks for interdisciplinary approach, which lies at the intersection of networking, communication and information theory.  
 
This tutorial introduces the main fundamental tools required to design traffic-aware MIMO schemes, as well as recent theoretical results in this area. We will provide the mathematical tools and the methodology to optimize the MIMO precoding while taking into account the queueing constraints of the users. Intuitive understanding of recent research results and identification of some open problems will be also presented. Furthermore, we will provide fundamental insights on the asymptotic performance limits of the network under bursty traffic, as well as on the interplay between design parameters.
 
Presenters:
Mérouane Debbah is Full Professor at CentraleSupélec (Gif-sur-Yvette, France), Vice-President of the Huawei France R&D center, and director of the Huawei Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab. He received his M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He previously worked for Motorola Labs, the Vienna Research Center for Telecommunications, and Institut Eurecom. Dr. Debbah is IEEE Fellow and WWRF Fellow. His research interests are in information theory, signal processing and wireless communications. He is the recipient of the Mario Boella award in 2005, the 2007 IEEE GLOBECOM best paper award, the Wi-Opt 2009 best paper award, the 2010 Newcom++ best paper award, the WUN CogCom Best Paper 2012 and 2013 Award, the 2014 WCNC best paper award as well as the Valuetools 2007, Valuetools 2008, CrownCom2009, Valuetools 2012 and SAM 2014 best student paper awards. In 2011, he received the IEEE Glavieux Prize Award and in 2012, the Qualcomm Innovation Prize Award.
 
 
 
 Mohamad Assaad received the MSc and PhD degrees (with high honors), both in telecommunications, from Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Since March 2006, he has been with the Telecommunications Department at CentraleSupélec, where he is currently an associate professor. He has co-authored 1 book and more that 75 publications in journals and conference proceedings and serves regularly as TPC member for several top international conferences. He has co-authored two papers selected among the best 5 papers at IEEE WiOpt Princeton 2011 and IEEE ICN 04. His research interests include mathematical models of communication networks, resource optimization and cross-layer design in wireless networks, and stochastic network optimization. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.
 


TA4: Socially Enabled Wireless Networks

Abstract:
Emerging online social networks significantly change the way of content distribution and information dissemination, while the traffic of social networks dominates Internet traffic in the mobile communication networks. Therefore, it is vital to design future wireless networks and 5G mobile communications by properly leveraging the properties of social networks. Socially-aware techniques have been widely applied to design mobile social networks and D2D communication mechanisms. After the introduction of the interplay between social networks and technological networks in 2013, we shall further look into the fundamentals of network science and subsequent social network analysis, and the abstract ways to utilize the nature of social networks to design wireless networks, supplying with successful engineering examples. Various aspects from analysis and system applications will be presented in this tutorial. It shall open a new scenario and subsequently paradigm shift in the technology development of more efficient wireless networks and wireless communications to better meet the expectation from users.
 
Presenter:
Kwang-Cheng Chen received the B.S. from the National Taiwan University in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D from the University of Maryland, College Park, United States, in 1987 and 1989, all in electrical engineering. From 1987 to 1998, Dr. Chen worked with SSE, COMSAT, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and National Tsing Hua University, in mobile communications and networks. Since 1998, Dr. Chen has been with National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. After serving Director, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, Communication Research Center, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, he is the Distinguished Professor with National Taiwan University and visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2015-2016. He has been actively involving in the organization of various IEEE conferences as General/TPC chair/co-chair, and has served in editorships with a few IEEE journals. He is the Chair for the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Social Networks, 2016-2017, and serving in Big Data activities in the IEEE ComSoc, IEEE SP Society, and IEEE Big Data Initiatives. Dr. Chen also actively participates in and has contributed essential technology to various IEEE 802, Bluetooth, and LTE and LTE-A wireless standards. Dr. Chen is an IEEE Fellow and has received a number of awards such as the 2011 IEEE COMSOC WTC Recognition Award, 2014 IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award and 2014 IEEE COMSOC AP Outstanding Paper Award. His recent research interests include wireless communications, network science, and data science.
 
 

TA5: Title Visible Light Communications and Networking

Abstract:
The radio spectrum is a finite resource and existing RF wireless technologies suffer from the spectrum scarcity. However, focusing on spectrum alone to grow capacity is limited and unlikely to solve the expected network congestion. Approaches to add capacity including spectrally efficient modulation, multiple antennas and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are considered. The visible light communications (VLC) or LiFi is an emerging technology that uses the existing lighting infrastructure to allow data communication combined with illumination. VLC has the potential for being an attractive complementary to realize indoor gigabit wireless access and to off-load data from existing cellular and WiFi networks.
 
This tutorial will be tailored to an audience coming from radio or optical background to comprehensively explore the VLC technology. It explains how VLC has evolved from being a point-to-point wireless transmission technology to a gigabit wireless access and networking technology. After a VLC introduction covering the applications, link configurations, different optical components and their effect on the link budget, we focus on the design and performance of state-of-the-art optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation formats and associated challenges under illumination constraints. The tutorial will also cover a range of optical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) aspects. Novel techniques such as illumination-compatible modulation, polar transmitters and spatial modulation that have the potential to significantly enhance the spectral and power efficiency of VLC systems are going to be reviewed. The tutorial also demonstrates how a hybrid WiFi/LiFi system enables multiuser access, full duplex communication and handover. The tutorial also introduces such hybrid proof-of-concept setup.
 
Presenter:
Hany Elgala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the University at Albany - State University of New York (SUNY). Before moving to SUNY Albany, he was a Research Professor at Boston University and the Communications Testbed Thrust leader at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC). During 2010–2012, Prof. Elgala was the co-leader of the Cellular and Wireless Communications (CWC) Lab at Jacobs University in Germany. There, he coordinated two industrial projects with Airbus Germany and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) to realize high-speed and cellular optical wireless networks in airplane cabins. He has authored and co-authored over 50 journal and conference publications. His main research interests are in optical communications and hybrid RF/optical systems with a particular focus on the visible light communications (VLC) or LiFi technology, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission.
 

 

TP1: Designing 5G Networks: an Energy Efficient Perspective

Abstract:
The tutorial is aimed at providing an energy efficient perspective on the design of 5G networks, by first introducing the 5G scenario and providing an overview of power consumption in cellular networks, aimed at identifying the major sources of power consumption and to understand the basic tradeoffs in energy efficient design of 5G networks. In particular, it will cover the following topics: (1) energy efficient physical layer design via optimized coding and modulation schemes, (2) energy-neutral network design, by integrating wireless powered communications, (3) 5G networks planning, including extremely dense deployments and multi-owner infrastructure, (4) 5G networks operation and energy efficient virtualization schemes, and (5) advanced wireless networking paradigms (i.e. cognitive radio in 5G sytems). All major solutions will be analyzed and compared by offering the unique vision provided by the combined experience of the speakers, encompassing theoretical and industrial research, advanced research concepts and relevant testbed experiments.
 
Presenters:
Fabrizio Granelli is IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-15, and Associate Professor at the Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) of the University of Trento (Italy). From 2008, he is deputy head of the academic council in Information Engineering. He received the «Laurea» (M.Sc.) degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. In August 2004 and August 2010, he was visiting professor at the State University of Campinas (Brasil). He is author or co-author of more than 130 papers with topics related to networking, with focus on performance modeling, wireless communications and networks, cognitive radios and networks, green networking and smart grid communications. Dr. Granelli was guest-editor of ACM Journal on Mobile Networks and Applications, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, and Hindawi Journal of Computer Systems, Networks and Communications. He was General Chair of the 11th and 15th IEEE Workshop on Computer-Aided Modeling, Analysis, and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD’06 and IEEE CAMAD’10). He is TPC Co-Chair of IEEE GLOBECOM Symposium on “Communications QoS, Reliability and Performance Modeling” in the years 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2012. He was officer (Secretary 2005-2006, Vice-Chair 2007-2008, Chair 2009-2010) of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Communication Systems Integration and Modeling (CSIM), and Associate Editor of IEEE Communications Letters (2007-2011).

 
Marco Di Renzo (SM’05-AM’07-M’09-SM’14) received the Laurea (cum laude) and the Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Information Engineering from the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of L’Aquila, Italy, in April 2003 and in January 2007, respectively. In October 2013, he received the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) degree majoring in Wireless Communications Theory, from the University of Paris-Sud XI, France. From August 2002 to January 2008, he was with the Center of Excellence for Research DEWS, University of L’Aquila, Italy. From February 2008 to April 2009, he was a Research Associate with the Telecommunications Technological Center of Catalonia (CTTC), Barcelona, Spain. From May 2009 to December 2009, he was an EPSRC Research Fellow with the Institute for Digital Communications (IDCOM), The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom (UK). Since January 2010, he has been a Tenured Academic Researcher (“Chargé de Recherche Titulaire”) with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), as well as a faculty member of the Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S), a joint research laboratory of the CNRS, the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (SUPELEC), and the University of Paris-Sud XI, Paris, France. His main research interests are in the area of wireless communications theory, signal processing, and information theory. Dr. Di Renzo is the recipient of a special mention for the outstanding five–year (1997–2003) academic career, University of L’Aquila, Italy; the THALES Communications fellowship for doctoral studies (2003–2006), University of L’Aquila, Italy; the Best Spin–Off Company Award (2004), Abruzzo Region, Italy; the Torres Quevedo award for research on ultra wide band systems and cooperative localization for wireless networks (2008–2009), Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain; the “Dérogation pour l’Encadrement de Thèse” (2010), University of Paris–Sud XI, France; the 2012 IEEE CAMAD Best Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society; the 2012 Exemplary Reviewer Award from the IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS of the IEEE Communications Society; the 2013 IEEE VTC-Fall Student Best Paper Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society for the paper entitled "Performance of Spatial Modulation using Measured Real-World Channels"; the 2013 NoE-NEWCOM# Best Paper Award; the 2013 Top Reviewer Award from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society; the 2013 IEEE/COMSOC Best Young Researcher Award for the EMEA Region; and the 2014 IEEE ICNC Best Paper Award for the IEEE Wireless Communications Symposium of the IEEE Communications Society for the paper entitled " Performance Analysis of Spatial Modulation MIMO in a Poisson Field of Interferers”. He currently serves as an Editor of the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS and of the IEEE TRNSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS (Heterogeneous Networks Modeling and Analysis).


Christos Verikoukis Christos Verikoukis got his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Catalonia in 2000. He is currently a Senior Researcher and Head of the SMARTECH at CTTC and an adjunct professor at UB. His area of expertise is in the design of energy efficient layer 2 protocols and RRM algorithms, for short-range wireless cooperative and network coded communications. He has published 85 journal papers and over 150 conference papers. He is also co-author in 3 books, 16 chapters in different books and in 2 patents. Dr. Verikoukis has participated more than 20 competitive projects (IST, ICT, CELTIC, MEDEA+, CATRENE, Marie-Curie, COST) while he has served as the Principal investigator in 3 national projects in Greece and Spain as well as the technical manager in 7 Marie-Curie and 2 Celtic projects. In addition Dr. Verikoukis has also served as an external consultant to different companies. He has served as co-editor in 6 special issues while he has participated in the organization of several international conferences. He is also a regular reviewer in a number of international journals. He has appointed to serve as a reviewer in FP7 projects funded by the European Commission and as an EU-independent expert acting evaluator in ARTEMIS-JU and as an evaluator and rapporteur in FP7 and H2020 funded programs. He has supervised 15 Ph.D. students and 5 Post Docs researchers since 2004. He was General Chair of the 17th and 18th and 19th IEEE Workshop on Computer-Aided Modeling, Analysis, and Design of Communication Links and Networks (IEEE CAMAD’12, CAMAD’13, CAMAD´14) and the TPC Co-Chair of the 15th IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services (Helathcom’13) and the 6th IEEE Latin-American Conference on Communications (LATINCOM) 2014. He has also served as the co-chair of the CQRM symposium in ICC 2015 and ICC 2016 and the chiar of the eHealth symposium in Globecom 2015 . He is currently Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Communication Systems Integration and Modeling (CSIM). Dr. Verikoukis received the best paper award of the Communication QoS, Reliability & Modeling Symposium (CQRM) symposium in IEEE ICC’11 conference, of the Selected Area of Communication symposia in IEEE Globecom 2015 and the Eurasip Best paper award 2013.


Abbas Jamalipour (S’86–M’91–SM’00–F’07) is the Professor of Ubiquitous Mobile Networking at the University of Sydney, Australia, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Nagoya University, Japan. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE) and the Institution of Engineers Australia, an ACM Professional Member, and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He is the author of six technical books, nine book chapters, over 350 technical papers, and five patents, all in the area of wireless communications. He was the Editor-in-Chief IEEE Wireless Communications (2006-08), Vice President-Conferences (2012-13) and a member of Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society, and has been an editor for several journals. Previously he has held positions of the Chair of the Communication Switching and Routing and the Satellite and Space Communications Technical Committees and Vice Director of the Asia Pacific Board, in ComSoc. He was a General Chair or Technical Program Chair for a number of conferences, including IEEE ICC, GLOBECOM, WCNC and PIMRC. Dr. Jamalipour is also an elected member of the Board of Governors (2014-16), IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards such as the 2010 IEEE ComSoc Harold Sobol Award, the 2006 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Contribution to Satellite Communications Award, the 2006 IEEE ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper Award.
 

TP2: The Road to 5G: Small Cells, Context-Awareness, and Ultra Dense Networks

Abstract:
Small cell networks (SCNs) are seen as a promising solution for boosting network capacity, while efficiently offloading data and expanding coverage in a cost-effective manner. In this tutorial, we provide a brief overview on SCNs while highlighting key challenges, associated techniques, and future landscape towards 5G. First, we delve into the details of advanced interference management techniques tailored for the unique features of SCNs. In particular, we introduce key concepts such as cell range expansion (CRE), cell association, and intercell and interference coordination (ICIC) that lie at the heart of 4G networks. Then, we discuss in detail the concept of self-organizing networks (SONs) and its key role in self-configuring and self-optimizing small cell deployment. Here, we focus on novel game-theoretic and learning techniques that are seen as an enabler for deploying self-optimizing and self-configuring heterogeneous and small cell networks. Besides, we will present the latest trends in small cell research such as cellular-WiFi integration (2015 COMSOC Fred Ellersick Prize), dual/multi connectivity, dynamic TDD and decoupled uplink-downlink, full duplexing, co-primary operator spectrum sharing (CoPSS), backhaul-aware resource management, etc.
This tutorial builds on its successful predecessors given at IEEE PIMRC 2012, IEEE GLOBECOM 2012, IEEE DySPAN 2014, IEEE WCNC 2014, IEEE GLOBECOM 2014, IEEE ICC 2015, and IEEE DySPAN 2015. This will be carried out by presenting the latest state-of-the-art developments of SCNs leading to the much anticipated 5G, with key insights on ultra-dense networks (UDN), edge caching, Massive MIMO, self- backhauling and its interplay with millimeter wave communication. Finally, the paradigm of anticipatory/proactive networks leveraging context-awareness and storage at the network edge, seen as key enablers for 5G networks, will be presented.

Presenter:
Mehdi Bennis (Senior Member, IEEE) received his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering jointly from the EPFL, Switzerland and the Eurecom Institute, France in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he worked as a research engineer at IMRA-EUROPE investigating adaptive equalization algorithms for mobile digital TV. In 2004, he joined the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of Oulu, Finland as a research scientist. In 2008, he was a visiting researcher at the Alcatel-Lucent chair on flexible radio, SUPELEC. He obtained his Ph.D. in December 2009 on spectrum sharing for future mobile cellular systems. His main research interests are in radio resource management, heterogeneous networks, game theory and machine learning in 5G networks and beyond. He has co-authored one book and published more than 100 research papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. He was the recipient of the prestigious 2015 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. Dr. Bennis serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Oulu.
 

 

TP3: Greening the Lasthop Access

Abstract:
A variety of bandwidth‐hungry applications and services such as high‐definition television, video streaming, and social networking are being deployed rapidly, thus leading to a continuous surge in bandwidth demand across networking infrastructure, notably the access portion (last‐hop access). Therefore, both wireline and wireless telecommunications operators are driven to upgrade their access networks to provide broader bandwidth for their subscribers. Upgrading the provisioning capacity of access networks leads to a dramatic increase of energy consumption. The network energy consumption contributes to part of its operational expenditure, and high power consumption exerts high requirements on performances of the backup battery at network terminal devices. Moreover, owing to the direct impact of greenhouse gases on the earth environment and the climate change, the energy consumption is becoming an environmental and thus social and economic issue. Therefore, it is important to design and build energy efficient high capacity access networks. This tutorial will discuss the roadmap in designing energy efficient access networks, cover the state of the art on greening wire and wireless access networks, present the research challenges on achieving energy efficient high capacity access networks, and provide a discussion alluding to the 5G development as well as mobile edge computing.
 
Presenter:
Nirwan Ansari (S’78–M’83–SM’94–F’09) is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He has also been a visiting (chair) professor at several universities such as High‐level Visiting Scientist at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. 
He is authoring Green Mobile Networks: A Networking Perspective (John Wiley, 2016) with T. Han, and co‐authored two other books. He has also (co)authored approximately 500 technical publications, over one third published in widely cited journals/magazines. He has guest‐edited a number of special issues covering various emerging topics in communications and networking. He has served on the editorial/advisory board of over ten journals. 
He was elected to serve in the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Board of Governors as a member‐at‐large, has chaired ComSoc technical committees, and has been actively organizing numerous IEEE International Conferences/Symposia/Workshops. He has frequently delivered keynote addresses, distinguished lectures, tutorials, and invited talks. Some of his recognitions include IEEE Fellow, several Excellence in Teaching Awards, a couple of best paper awards, the NCE Excellence in Research Award, the ComSoc AHSN TC Outstanding Service Recognition Award, the NJ Inventors Hall of Fame Inventor of the Year Award, the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, Purdue University Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award, and designation as a COMSOC Distinguished Lecturer. He has also been granted over 25 U.S. patents. 
He received a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988, an MSEE from the University of Michigan in 1983, and a BSEE (summa cum laude with a perfect GPA) from NJIT in 1982. 

TP4: Towards the Vehicular Cloud: From Connected Cars to Smart Cities

Abstract:
Cities around the world are currently under quick transition towards a low carbon environment, high quality of living, and resource efficient economy. Urban performance depends not only on the city's endowment of hard infrastructure, but also on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure. There is a growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. Looking back at the last decade, one can observe enormous progress in the domain of vehicular networking. In this growing community, many ongoing activities focus on the design of communication protocols to support safety applications, intelligent navigation, multi-player gaming and others. We are now entering an era that might change the game in road traffic management. We will primarily discuss the challenges and opportunities of the connected cars vision in relation to some of the most needed components in modern smart cities: improved road traffic safety combined with reduced travel times and emissions. Using selected application examples including the use of virtual traffic lights, intelligent intersection management, and platooning, we assess the needs on the underlying system components with a particular focus on inter-vehicle communication. We also shed light on the potentials of a vehicular cloud based on parked vehicles as a spatio-temporal network and storage infrastructure. The tutorial is supported by a textbook on “Vehicular Networking” authored by Falko Dressler that will be published just ahead of the tutorial lecture by Cambridge Press.
 
Presenter:
Falko Dressler is a Full Professor for Computer Science and head of the Distributed Embedded Systems Group at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Paderborn. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Erlangen in 1998 and 2003, respectively. He is an editor for journals such as IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier Computer Communications, and Elsevier Nano Communication Networks. He was guest editor of special issues on self-organization, autonomic networking, vehicular networks, and bio-inspired communication for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, and others. Dr. Dressler was General Chair and TPC chair for conferences such as IEEE VNC 2014, ACM MobiHoc 2016, and IEEE INFOCOM 2017. Dr. Dressler authored the textbooks Self-Organization in Sensor and Actor Networks published by Wiley in 2007 and Vehicular Networking published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Dr. Dressler has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer as well as an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE as well as a Senior Member of ACM. He is actively participating in the IETF standardization. His research objectives include adaptive wireless networking, self-organization techniques, and embedded system design with applications in ad hoc and sensor networks, vehicular networks, industrial wireless networks, and nano-networking.

 

TP5: Internet of Things: Enablers, Trends, and Challenges

Abstract:
According to many analysts, connecting things to things is by far the next big thing that Internet is expected to embrace after being the tube for people to people connections! By 2020, tens of billions of devices (things) will be connected to the Internet and generating massive amount of data approaching 40% of the data transmitted on the Internet. The IoT potential economic impact is estimated to reach more than ten trillion dollars a year by 2025. The proliferation of IoT applications is expected to happen in verticals which are primary impacting the society and the economic development such as energy and water management, logistics and transportation, medical and healthcare systems, building and home automation, manufacturing and agriculture, environment monitoring, public safety and land security, media, etc.
 
The intent of this tutorial is not to get deeper into a very specific technical/research topic or focusing on outdated technology enablers. It is rather a top-down overview of the emerging technology enablers and trends in terms of hardware, communication, computing, big data storage and mining, standards, platforms, privacy and security, etc. Technical and non-technical challenges that may slow down, if not sorted out, the development and the adoption of IoT solutions and services will be identified and discussed.
 
The tutorial will identify (hot) research issues that could interest researchers willing to contribute in different areas of IoT such as devices/gateways design and communication, data collection/aggregation/fusion, (real-time) data analysis/retrieval, and privacy and security. The ultimate aim is to make the audience aware of the recent technological trends as well as the challenges which can help them identifying interesting research topics and initial ideas about possible ways to address.
 
The intended audience is both young researchers like graduate students and post-doctoral as well as (senior) faculty members and practitioners willing to start working on research topics related to IoT and/or get an up-to-date overview about the recent development and the global trends.
Attendees will have the opportunity to experience a live demonstration of an IoT platform (branded as LabeebTM) developed by QMIC (http://www.labeeb-iot.com) The Labeeb IoT open platform is the result of three years if R&D work at QMIC. The first release that will be open to the public will be released in December 2015 which is made available for researchers and entrepreneurs to speed up their prototyping, experiments, and analysis.
The content of the tutorial will cover the following topics:
  1. From connecting people to connecting things:  IoT enablers
  2. IoT applications 
  3. Global players and market overview
  4. IoT lifecycle
  5. IoT devices and gateways: sensing, communication, power consumption, and integration
  6. Addressing and naming in IoT
  7. Integration of existing standards in IoT (CoAP, MQTT, etc.)
  8. Network architecture and system design in IoT
  9. IoT platforms
  10. Data management and analytics in IoT
  11. Privacy, security and trust for IoT
  12. IoT and Big Data: the big brothers!
  13. IoT and cloud computing
  14. IoT modelling, large-scale simulation, and testbeds
  15. Labeeb IoT: a live demo!
For each topic, the presenter will provide an overview, recent trends, and, when applicable, top research issues.
 
Presenter:
Fethi Filali is the Head of Technology Development & Applied Research at Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC). He is leading the technology development for QMIC's ITS, IoT, and Connected Cars solutions.  He has invented technologies and developed algorithms that have been shipped in many QMIC products, including Masarak®, Labeeb® and WaveTraf®, creating commercial impact in the order of millions of dollars. He is the Lead PI of four research projects QNRF-funded in several areas including connected vehicles, cooperative video transmission over wireless, and data-driven mobility services.
 
Prior to joining QMIC in January 2010, Dr. Filali was with the Mobile Communications department of EURECOM, Sophia-Antipolis, France, as Assistant then Associate Professor for 7 years. During this period, he was the PI of more than twelve French and European research projects. In the context of some of them, he led the design and development an open architecture for the support of heterogeneous radio access technologies which was integrated lately in EURECOM’s OpenAirInterfaceTM software-radio platform. His current research interests include the design, development, and performance evaluation of communication protocols and algorithms for areas such as Internet of Things, Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems, and mobile crowdsourcing/crowdsensing.  
 
Dr. Filali received his MSc in Computer Science from the National School of Computer Science,Tunisia, in 1999 and a PhD in Computer Sciences (Distributed Systems and Networking) from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2012, with an outstanding dissertation award. In April 2008, he was awarded the Habilitation degree from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis for his extensive research on wireless networking and communications.
 
He was the Ph.D. Supervisor of more than ten Ph.D. students in the area of wireless sensor and mesh networks, vehicular communications, big data analytics, and mobility management. Dr. Filali co-authored more than 120 research papers in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals and he is the (co-)inventor for more than 10 patents.