Technical Tutorials

GC 2015 provides half-day tutorials, which provide focused lectures of new and emerging topics within the scope of communications.

Attendees will receive the selected tutorial (s) plus coffee breaks on the selected day.

For tutorial registration, see: http://globecom2015.ieee-globecom.org/registration

For industry tutorials, see here.

Sunday, December 6 2015

Half Day - Morning (8:15 – 12:00)

Half Day - Afternoon (13:30 – 17:15)

Thursday, December 10 2015

Half Day - Morning (8:15 – 12:00)

Half Day - Afternoon (13:30 – 17:15)


TT-1: 5G Fundamentals and System Design

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Indigo 202A

Presenters
  • Etienne Chaponniere (Qualcomm, USA)
  • John Smee (Qualcomm, USA)
  • Joseph Soriaga (Qualcomm, USA)
  • Vasanthan Raghavan (Qualcomm, USA)
  • Gavin Horn (Qualcomm, USA)
This tutorial will cover 5G fundamentals and system design. The tutorial will cover multiple topics including
  1. 5G worldwide organizations and 3GPP standardization
  2. 5G systems design across bands and services
  3. 5G waveform, modulation, and multiple access design
  4. 5G mmWave propagation and beam-based design
  5. 5G network and systems architecture design

TT-2: Fog Network and Internet of Things (IoT) in Wireless 5G Environments

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Indigo 206

Presenters
  • Mung Chiang and Ming-Jye Sheng (Princeton University, USA)
  • Tao Zhang (Cisco Systems, USA)
  • Shihi Chen (III, Taiwan)
  • Ai-Chun Pang and Hung-Yu Wei (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Pushing computation, control and storage into the "cloud" has been a key trend in networking in the past decade. The cloud is now "descending" to the network edge and often diffused among the edge and client devices in both mobile and wireline networks. This leads to "fog". Empowered by the latest chips, radios, and sensors, edge and client devices today are more powerful in computation, in storage, in sensing and in communication. Yet these devices can still be limited in battery power, global view of the network, and mobility support. Most interestingly, the collection of many clients in a crowd presents a highly distributed, under-organized, and possibly dense network in future Wireless 5G Environments.

TT-3: Full-Duplex Communications and Networks: Fundamentals, Technologies, and Applications

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Cobalt 520

Presenters
  • Lingyang Song (Peking University, P.R. China)
  • Zhu Han (University of Houston, USA)
Almost all currently deployed radios for wireless communications are operated in the half-duplex mode, where transmit and receive signals are allocated in two separate/orthogonal channels. The recent significant progress in realizing full-duplex(FD)systems has opened up another promising avenue for increasing the capacity of future wireless networks. There is an urgent need to address the diverse set of challenges regarding different aspects of FD network design, theory, and development. In addition to the self-interference cancelation signal processing algorithms, network protocols such as resource management are also essential in the practical design and implementation of FD wireless networks. This tutorial aims to present the latest development and future directions from physical, MAC, to application layers for different full duplex systems in different domains, including power, space, frequency, and device dimensions. A few representative application scenarios are considered: FD MIMO systems, FD cooperative networks, FD OFDMA cellular networks, FD heterogeneous networks, FD cognitive radio networks, and FD energy harvesting networks. Novel signal processing algorithms and resource management problems in these systems are presented, and key open research directions are discussed.

TT-4 : Green Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 314

Presenters
  • Muhammad Ismail (Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar)
  • Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir (Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), Qatar)
  • Erchin Serpedin (Texas A&M University, USA)
  • Khalid A. Qaraqe (Texas A&M University at Qatar, USA)
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 literature, various solutions have been proposed to enable efficient energy usage in wireless networks, and these approaches are referred to as green wireless communications and networking. 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. Through multi-homing capability, an MT can maintain multiple simultaneous associations with different networks. Besides enhancing the achieved data rate through bandwidth aggregation, the heterogeneous wireless medium along with the multi-homing service can enhance energy efficiency of network operators and mobile users. 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.

TT-5: Designing Next Generation Energy Efficient Wireless Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 300A

Presenters
  • Fabrizio Granelli (University of Trento, Italy)
  • Marco Di Renzo (French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France)
  • Christos Verikoukis (Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia, Spain)
  • Abbas Jamalipour (University of Sydney, Australia)
With the increasing growth of mobile access to the Internet and its services, 5G wireless networks represent a key communication infrastructure for ubiquitous connectivity of the future. The need to support exponential growth in data traffic as well as availability of several mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) is leading to a sharp increase in the number and density of base station devices as well as in their complexity, leading to a consequent increase in power usage and consumption. Indeed, high power consumption could represent a limiting factor for the scalability and deployment of 5G wireless networks and one of the possible causes of the well-known operators' cost-revenue gap. The tutorial is aimed at providing an energy efficient perspective on the design of 5G networks, by 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. Based on the 5G scenario of heterogeneous coexisting wireless technologies, the tutorial will then target the most relevant future and emerging technology supporting energy efficiency, and in particular: physical layer design, energy-neutral wireless network design, 5G networks planning, 5G networks operation and cognitive radios and networks in 5G. The intended audience includes Ph.D. students, researchers, professionals working in the communications field.

TT-6: Stochastic Geometry for the Analysis and Design of 5G Cellular Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Indigo 206

Presenters
  • Martin Haenggi (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Future cellular systems are characterized by irregular and heterogeneous deployments with high densities of base stations. As a result, base stations and users are best modeled using stochastic point processes, which permits the application of the powerful tools of stochastic geometry for the network performance analysis. In the first part, the tutorial provides a rigorous introduction to stochastic geometry, including the main models and the key results that enable closed-form calculations of distributions and spatial averages of network performance metrics, including transmission success probabilities, throughput, and delay. Spatial averaging is the process of averaging over the likely realizations of the network topology. It yields results that are valid for general classes of networks, rather than being restricted to a particular deployment of nodes in a network. In the second part, we focus on emerging single- and multi-tier cellular systems. The main metrics of interest are the distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the per-user capacity. First focusing on a Poisson model for the base stations (BSs), we derive the complete SINR statistics for different cases of BS cooperation, including BS silencing, joint transmission, and interference cancellation, and we show the effects of network densification. Next we turn our attention to more general network models that reflect the intra- and inter- tier dependencies that exist in heterogeneous cellular systems. Lastly, we present a novel and simple analytical framework based on the mean interference-to-signal ratio that yields simple expressions that provide very good approximations of the SINR distributions for many types of deployments and cooperation schemes.

TT-7: OpenWSN & OpenMote: Hands-on Tutorial on Open Source Industrial IoT

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Indigo 202A

Presenters
  • Thomas Watteyne (Inria & Linear Technology, Dust Networks Product Group, France)
  • Xavier Vilajosana (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain)
  • Pere Tuset-Peiro (OpenMote Technologies, Spain)
This tutorial aims at acquainting its audience with ongoing standardization activities around the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), and provide hands-on experience through the OpenWSN and OpenMote ecosystems. OpenWSN was founded in 2010 and together with the OpenMote platform, which was launched in 2014, it has become the de-facto open-source implementation of IEEE802.15.4e-2012 Time Synchronized Channel Hopping (TSCH). TSCH is the standard at the heart of the IIoT, which enables ultra high reliability and low-power operation. This tutorial is tailored to the level of practicing engineers and advanced researchers who are interested in tomorrow's Industrial IoT, as well as hands-on experience.

TT-8: Optical Wireless Communications

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 314

Presenters
  • Jean Armstrong (Monash University, Australia)
  • Maite Brandt-Pearce (University of Virginia, USA)
  • Zhengyuan Xu (University of Science and Technology of China, P.R. China)
As the radio frequency spectrum congests, the optical medium provides an attractive alternative, supplying ample and easily-reusable spectral resources. Optical wireless communications that use light to carry information through a tetherless channel can offer Gbps connectivity to wireless users. This tutorial covers the essential characteristics of optical wireless systems and will provide communications engineers with the background required to work within this exciting field. State-of-the-art system design, performance, and applications are described. The tutorial will cover a range of theoretical and practical aspects of optical wireless communications including indoor and outdoor links.

TT-9: Tutorial on Nanoscale, Molecular, and Quantum Communications

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua Salon AB

Presenters
  • Andrew Eckford (York University, Canada)
  • Urbashi Mitra (University of Southern California, USA)
  • Lajos Hanzo (University of Southampton, UK)
How can we communicate at very small length scales? This question may unlock new applications in nanorobotics and medicine, but has only recently attracted attention from communication and information theorists. The answer to the question is surprisingly difficult: not only are the required techniques the unfamiliar to communication engineers, but the mathematical details of the communication environment are complicated. Attendees of this tutorial will: understand the basic physics and mathematics of nanoscale communication; understand nanoscale EM techniques; receive a basic introduction to the biological machinery of molecular communicaton; understand the communication and information theory of nanoscale communication; and understand some of the applications, both at nanoscale (e.g., nanomedicine) and macroscale (e.g., robots communicating via chemical “tags”). Signaling and interaction in some bacterial systems will also be considered. The tutorial will conclude with a brief exploration into a new research topic on quantum communications taking a short walk down Lajos' Quantum Ave.

TT-10: 5G Tactile Internet: Application, Challenges and First Solutions

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 305

Presenters
  • Gerhard P. Fettweis (Technische Universitaet Dresden, Germany)
  • Meryem Simsek (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)
A big step lies ahead, when moving from today's 4G cellular networks to tomorrows 5G network. Today, the network is used for content delivery, e.g. voice, video, data. Tomorrow, the 5G network will provide a ubiquitous Tactile Internet infrastructure for controlling and steering real and virtual objects. For this we must create a control processing and a control communications infrastructure. For enabling the former, distributed mobile edge cloud computing will be created at a level, unheard of today. For enabling the latter, latency and resilience requirements must be met by designing networks along new paradigms. The resulting Tactile Internet will shape our future and our society, touching almost every part of life.

TT-11: Bayesian-inspired non-convex methods for sparse signal recovery

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 307

Presenters
  • Bhaskar Rao (University of California, San Diego, USA)
  • Chandra R Murthy (Indian Institute of Science, India)
This tutorial examines a Bayesian framework to address algorithmic issues that arise in sparse signal recovery problems. There are numerous signal processing and communications applications where this problem naturally arises. Parsimonious signal representation using overcomplete dictionaries for compression, estimation of sparse communication channels with large delay spread as in underwater acoustics, low dimensional representation of MIMO channels, brain imaging techniques such as MEG and EEG, are a few examples. As evident from the numerous publications in this area, the emergence of compressive sensing and the associated recovery algorithms and theory have generated considerable excitement and interest in their application. This tutorial will examine more recent developments and a complementary set of tools based on a Bayesian framework to address the general problem of sparse signal recovery and the challenges associated with it. The Bayesian methods show considerable promise and have the flexibility necessary to deal with more general scenarios than hitherto possible. This generality and flexibility greatly facilitates their deployment in practice. Signal processing and communications engineers are well versed in statistical methods and so have the background necessary to benefit from this exposure.

TT-12: Empowering Future Networking Research and Experimentation through Software Defined Networking

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 303

Presenters
  • Muhammad T Anan (Alfaisal University, Saudi Arabia)
  • Ala Al-Fuqaha (Western Michigan University, USA)
The shortcomings of today's Internet and the high demand for complex and sophisticated applications and services drive a very interesting and novel research area called Future Internet. The area of Future Internet research focuses on developing a new network with similar magnitude as today's Internet but with more demanding and complex design goals and specifications. It strives to solve the issues identified in today's Internet, by capitalizing on the advantages of emerging new technologies in the area of computer networking such as Software Defined Networking (SDN). In recent years SDN has emerged as an exciting area of research which is challenging the current networking paradigm of designing and managing computer networks. SDN represents an extraordinary opportunity to rethink computer networks, enabling the design and deployment of a future Internet. SDN has the potential to revolutionize not only the way networks are built but can lead to emergence of new applications that were not previously possible. The tutorial aims to combine practical and hands-on experience with theoretical research from leading universities in order to create and deliver the best SDN educational content to the attendees. The goal of this tutorial is to introduce students, researchers, and industry practitioners to the SDN based technologies, describe some research initiatives and discuss how the research community can use them to shape the future Internet. The tutorial also provides live demos, hands-on experiments using SDN. The speakers will be sharing with the audience their experience in developing SDN-based research and applications. Some of these applications will be shared with the audience to demonstrate the capabilities of the technologies discussed throughout the tutorial.

TT-13: User-Provided Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 309

Presenters
  • Jianwei Huang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
  • Leandros Tassiulas (Yale University, USA)
The increasing mobile data demand and the proliferation of advanced handheld devices place user-provided networks (UPNs) in a conspicuous position for next-generation network architectures. There has been a growing consensus that UPNs can play a crucial role in both self-organizing and operator-controlled wireless networks, as they enable the exploitation of the diverse communication needs and resources of different users. However, in UPNs both the availability of and demand for Internet access depend on user devices. Therefore, the success of such networks relies on active and voluntary user participation. This tutorial will provide an overview of UPN, both in terms of industry practice and academic research, and focus on the opportunities and challenges for the incentive mechanism design of UPNs.

TT-14: Fundamental Limits of Robust Interference Management

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Cobalt 501A

Presenters
  • Syed Ali Jafar (University of California Irvine, USA)
The fundamental limits of future wireless networks depend critically on the ability to circumvent the interference barrier. On the one hand, the emergence of revolutionary ideas such as interference alignment has shown that the throughput limits of interference networks may be orders of magnitude higher than previously imagined. On the other hand, these promises are limited by the overly optimistic assumption of perfect and global channel knowledge. Since perfect channel knowledge is virtually impossible to achieve in practice, the real question is to determine the fundamental limits of interference management under channel uncertainty --- i.e., robust interference management. Given its critical importance, there has been a burst of activity toward answering this question, producing an array of novel, often surprising insights, as well as opening new lines of research on topics as varied as blind interference alignment, alternating and mixed channel knowledge, topological interference management and index coding, and the optimality of treating interference as noise. This tutorial brings the audience up to date with these recent advances and summarizes the most important open problems going forward. The tutorial will place special emphasis on the fundamental, i.e., information theoretic, aspects of interference management. Topics covered will include -- the non-trivial nature of bandwidth and degrees of freedom metrics in a multiuser setting; the tradeoffs between accessible signaling dimensions -- time, frequency, space and signal levels -- in a wireless network with multiple antenna nodes; the principle of interference alignment; the promise of interference alignment under idealized assumptions; the fundamental limitations of interference alignment and cooperation under total channel uncertainty; blind interference alignment schemes that exploit channel correlation structures that exist naturally or may be artificially introduced through staggered antenna switching; synergistic gains of mixed channel knowledge, and of alternating channel knowledge; important conjectures regarding capacity limits under channel uncertainty and their resolution; topological interference management principles and their connection to index coding and hat-guessing problems; the optimality of treating interference as noise; and finally a discussion of the some of the most interesting directions for future work on these topics. The intended audience for this tutorial consists of students, researchers as well as research program managers from industry, government and academia who are working on or interested in the future potential of communication technologies in general and in fundamental limits of robust interference management in particular.

TT-15: Hands-on experimentation with cognitive radio enabled systems

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 305

Presenters
  • Luiz DaSilva (Trinity College & Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
  • Mikolaj Chwalisz (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
  • Wei Liu (University Ghent - iMinds, Belgium)
  • Adnan Bekan (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Scarcity of spectrum is one of the factors limiting the increase of wireless access networks capacity. So, together with high interest in adopting new frequency bands, it is necessary that multiple networks will have to share large parts of the spectrum. Cognitive radio principle is a promising way to open the doors for such sharing. While the research in this area is very active, there is an acknowledged issue that the design and execution of real experiments remains very labor and cost intensive. Researchers and educators who are interested in experimentation with cognitive radio systems should have an understanding of: 1. How experiments with cognitive radio systems should be designed? 2. How to use the available testbed facilities? 3. What are the typical mistakes made while setting up cognitive radio experiments? The tutorial will address the above issues by set of presentations and hands-on exercises.

TT-16: On the “Cloudification” of Mobile Core Networks

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 307

Presenters
  • Tarik Taleb (Aalto University, Finland)
  • Adlen Ksentini (University of Rennes 1 / IRISA Lab, France)
This tutorial will shed light on the road towards the 5G networks system by virtualizing the core mobile networks. It will detail several concepts (Federated Cloud, Software Defined Networks - SDN, Network Function Virtualization - NFV, etc.), building the concept of Carrier Cloud, an important enabler of the 5G systems. The tutorial begins by reviewing the system architectures defined by the 3GPP, from GSM, GPRS, UMTS and LTE, comparing amongst the different relevant architectures and their evolution to the nowadays' Evolved Packet System (EPS). After a short discussion on the basic principles of LTE, the tutorial presents the major architectural enhancements that have been already standardized within 3GPP for supporting EPS. Then, the tutorial gives insight on the requirements of 5G networks systems as per definition of the 3GPP, and the different government actions, such as the 5GPPP Europe initiative, and why the current architectures (i.e. LTE, UMTS) are not able to support those needs. The tutorial will be afterwards touching the ongoing advances in cloud computing, NFV and SDN to support virtualized services and to build flexible, scalable, and elastic 5G systems. On the one hand, the tutorial will disclose the several scenarios to envision for virtualizing the EPC functions and entities (i.e. which EPS function needs to be virtualized?), and compare the advantage and inconvenient of each scenario; on the other hand, it will detail the VNF orchestration and management procedures to instantiate flexible and on demand 5G services through the ANYthing as a Service (ANYaaS) principle. Particularly, the tutorial will discuss how ANYaaS will be designed, positioned in the NFV reference architecture, instantiated, configured, managed, and orchestrated, and that using current cloud infrastructure management tools, such as OpenStack. The tutorial will finish by highlighting few open issues that are forming the focus of research efforts in the mobile cloud networking arena.

TT-17: Smart Cities and the Vehicular Cloud: Next Generation Vehicular Networking as a Primary Building Block

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 303

Presenters
  • Onur Altintas (Toyota InfoTechnology Center, Japan)
  • Falko Dressler (University of Paderborn, Germany)
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. Information and communication systems play a critical role in building smart cities and supporting comprehensive urban informatics. Extensive research is taking place on a wide range of enabling information and communication technologies, including cloud and network infrastructure, wireless and sensing technologies, mobile crowdsourcing, social networking, and big data analytics for smart cities. This brings together citizens and integrates technologies and services such as transportation, broadband communications, buildings, healthcare, and other utilities. Advanced communication and computing techniques can facilitate a participatory approach for achieving integrated solutions and creating novel applications to improve urban life and build a sustainable society. 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. Very large projects have been initiated to validate the theoretic work in field tests and protocols are being standardized. With the increasing interest from industry, security and privacy have also become crucial aspects in the stage of protocol design in order to support a smooth and carefully planned roll-out. Researchers from academia and industry recently met at an international Dagstuhl seminar to discuss open research challenges as well as open issues related to market-oriented design. We are now entering an era that might change the game in road traffic management. This is supported by the U.S. federal government announcement in February 2014 that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to begin working on a regulatory proposal that would require V2V devices in new vehicles in a future year. This NHTSA announcement coincides with the final standardization of higher layer networking protocols in Europe by the ETSI. 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. Vehicular networking solutions have been investigated for more than a decade but recent standardization efforts just enable a broad use of this technology to build large scale Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). One of the key questions is whether some pre-deployed infrastructure is needed to enable and to boost vehicular networks. We see many benefits in such infrastructure to store information and to provide connectivity among the vehicles. Yet, instead of using Roadside Units (RSUs), we envision to rely on parked vehicles to provide such vehicular cloud services.