Technical Workshops

GC 2015 offers an exciting and extensive list of workshops covering a broad range of topics.

All-day workshops and morning (AM) half-day workshops commence at 8:15 with a coffee break from 09:45 to 10:15 and morning (AM) half-day workshops finish at 12:00.

All-day workshops continue and afternoon (PM) half-day workshops commence at 13:30 with a coffee break from 15:15 to 15:45 and finish at 17:15.

All-day workshops offer lunch from 12:15.

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

For industry workshops, see here.

Sunday, December 6 2015

Full Day (8:15 –17:15)

Half Day - Morning (8:15 – 12:00)

Half Day - Afternoon (13:30 – 17:15)

Thursday, December 10 2015

Full Day (8:15 –17:15)

Half Day - Morning (8:15 – 12:00)

Half Day - Afternoon (13:30 – 17:15)


TW-1: 5G & Beyond – Enabling Technologies and Applications

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 17:15 • Sapphire 400

Organizers
  • Federico Boccardi, Ofcom
  • John Cunliffe, Ericsson
  • Mischa Dohler, King's College London
  • Gerhard Fettweis, Technische Universität Dresden
  • Ralf Irmer, Vodafone Group
  • Toktam Mahmoodi, King's College London
  • Theodore Rappaport, New York University
Starting from the undisputed explosive growth of connected devices, the ubiquitous nature of our daily communications, and finally the importance that social networks and the information exchanged over them play at personal and professional level, the workshop will focus on some of the related issues.

TW-2: Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA)

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 17:15 • Aqua Salon C

Organizers
  • Periklis Chatzimisios, Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki
  • Chuan Heng Foh, University of Surrey
  • Fen Hou, University of Macau
  • Yaser Jararweh, The University of Arizona
  • Burak Kantarci, Clarkson University
  • Kuan-Ching Li, Providence University
  • Jinsong Wu, Universidad de Chile
This Fourth International workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications will be a continuation of this series aiming at the crossroads between scientists, researchers, practitioners and students from diverse domains in Cloud computing research. The workshop aims presenting contributions of system and network design that can support existing and future applications and services.

TW-3: Internet of Things for Ambient Assisted Living (IoTAAL)

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

Organizers
  • Joel Rodrigues, Instituto de Telecomunicações, University of Beira Interior
  • Susanna Spinsante, Università Politecnica delle Marche
  • Chirag Warty, Intelligent Communication lab
The goal of the IoTAAL workshop is to bring researchers from the IoT field and the AAL field together, to foster a better common understanding, to exchange visions and latest research results addressing IoT specialization for AAL, to discuss promising new technologies and to highlight open research challenges. The focus of this workshop is on proposals of architectures, methods, techniques, protocols, components and tools addressing the IoT paradigm to support the Ambient Assisted Living requirements.

TW-4: Trusted Communications with Physical Layer Security

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Sapphire 410

Organizers
  • Trung Q. Duong, Queen's University Belfast
  • Maged Elkashlan, Queen Mary, University of London
  • Kyeong Jin Kim, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
  • Desmond McLernon, The University of Leeds
  • H. Vincent Poor, Princeton University
  • Nan Yang, Australian National University
  • Xiangyun Zhou, The Australian National University
Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channels, security and privacy is of utmost concern for future wireless technologies. How-ever, securely transferring confidential information over a wireless network in the presence of eavesdroppers that may intercept the information exchange between legitimate terminals, still remains a challenging task. Although security was originally viewed as a high-layer problem to be solved using cryptographic methods, physical layer (PHY) security is now emerging as a promising new (additional) means of defense to realize wireless secrecy in communications. In wireless PHY security, the breakthrough idea is to exploit the characteristics of wireless channels such as fading or noise to transmit a message from the source to the intended receiver while trying to keep this message confidential from both passive and active eavesdroppers. Over the past few years, PHY security has been widely recognized as a key enabling technique for secure wireless communications in future networks. This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and researchers from both academia and industry for discussion and technical presentations on fundamental and practically relevant questions related to the many challenges arising from secure PHY communications

TW-5: Quantum Communications and Information Technology

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 310

Organizers
  • Andrea Conti, ENDIF University of Ferrara, WiLAB University of Bologna
  • Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton
  • Soon Xin Ng, University of Southampton
The Quantum Communications and Information Technology (QCIT'15) workshop is dedicated to explore the new opportunities for application of communications theory and technologies to quantum technology. Over the last decade, a variety of physical quantum computing devices (called qubits) has been demonstrated and used for fundamental experiments in laboratories. Results confirm feasibility of real applications in quantum communications and information related fields. Very few specific applications, like a quantum technology based random number generator, are already available on the market. However, the step from a quantum technology based device (qubit) to a real system running a communications or information processing task has not completed yet. Moreover, it shows a lot of opportunities to contribute with know how, technologies and engineering out of the communications area. It is the aim of this workshop to connect people from academia and industry to discuss about theory, technology and applications and exchange ideas and move efficiently forward in the engineering and development of this exiting area.

TW-6: Millimeter-Wave Backhaul and Access: From Propagation to Prototyping

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

Organizers
  • Reza Arefi, Intel Corporation
  • Jeongho Park, Samsung Electronics
  • Joongheon Kim, Intel Corporation
  • Andreas Molisch, University of Southern California
  • Ali Sadri, Intel Corporation
Millimeter-wave systems are currently widely and actively studied by industry and academia for various next-generation advanced applications including high-speed wireless backhaul networks, peer-to-peer large-volume data sharing, and next generation 5G cellular access architectures. Due to the large amount of spectrum available at millimeter-wave frequencies, multi-Gbps data rates are easily achievable. However, millimeter-wave technology is encountering several research challenges and, therefore, this workshop discusses about various research issues and figure our promising solutions for the challenges.

TW-7: Optical Wireless Communication (OWC 2015)

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Cobalt 500

Organizers
  • Shlomi Arnon, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
  • Julian Cheng, University of British Columbia
  • Yeong Min Jang, Kookmin University
  • Murat Uysal, Ozyegin University
In recent years, a growing interest has been witnessed in the research and development of OWC systems. This is mainly driven by tremendous advancements in optical sources from high power bulky solid state lasers to low power compact light emitting diodes (LEDs) in different optical spectra (such as infrared, visible, ultraviolet), and detectors from vacuum tube based to semiconductor avalanche photodetectors. Lighting LEDs have been considered as next generation green lighting devices to replace incandescent and fluorescent lamps by the Department of Energy in the US. Besides the compelling advantages of the latest generation of LEDs for energy efficient lighting, these devices also offer tremendous opportunities for wireless communications. This comes at a time where the shortage of RF spectrum is a key issue, and where additional license free wireless transmission resources could provide significant spectrum relief – in particular when there already is an infrastructure in place. Consequently, the IEEE 802.15 TG7 is in the process of defining the first visible light communication standard. The workshop not only covers traditional infrared communications (both indoor and outdoor), but also the emerging visible light and ultraviolet communication technologies.

TW-8: Information Centric Network Solutions for Real-World Applications

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

Organizers
  • Jeff Burke, UCLA
  • Takuro Sato, Waseda University
Today’s Internet traffic is dominated by content distribution and retrieval. With the continued, rapid explosion of networked content, it becomes challenging to efficiently and securely provide quality of experience to the end-user. Tomorrow’s Internet is expected to interconnect billions of devices for both machine-to-machine communications and integration into end-user applications, posing challenges in addressing, security, and ease of development. To handle the continued growth of the Internet content and the explosion of interconnected devices that are expected, Information Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as an alternative to the current host-to-host communication paradigm. ICN has generated significant interest in the research community recently; as a result, within a very short period the research activity as well as experimental deployments of ICN has been significant. The state-of-art of ICN is now at a stage that allow the concerned community of researchers and potential developers to explore how ICN applications can address real world problems. The objective of this workshop is to cover the recent research and development on the experimental evaluation of real world applications of information centric networking, especially where key challenges of scalability, security, and ease of authoring distributed application have been explored. The workshop intends to stimulate more discussions on state-of-the-art research in this field and how it can address significant opportunities and challenges emerging from an increasingly networked world. This workshop will offer a venue for researchers from both industry and academic to demonstrate their recent progresses on experimental validation of Information Centric Networking solutions for the real world applications as well as to identify remaining challenges towards broader ICN deployment.

TW-9: Massive MIMO: From theory to practice

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Cobalt 500

Organizers
  • Ove Edfors, Lund University
  • Fredrik Rusek, Lund University
  • Christoph Studer, Cornell University
  • Liesbet Van der Perre, IMEC
Massive MIMO opens up a new dimension of wireless communications by using an excess of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. The technique allows for very efficient spatial multiplexing, attainable using linear processing in a time-division duplex mode. The excess of antennas brings about radical improvements in both energy and spectral efficiencies. In recent years, there has been substantial theoretical progress and the research community, as well as industry, has largely reached consensus that Massive MIMO will play a major practical role in the near future, influencing several communications standards. However, before we are ready to standardize and deploy Massive MIMO in practice, many important aspects still have to be addressed. The goal of the workshop is to solicit the latest physical-layer developments towards realizing Massive MIMO, with a focus on bridging the gaps between theory, algorithms, and practical implementations. The workshop will bring together academic and industrial researchers in order to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to Massive MIMO.

TW-10: Security, Privacy, and Forensics in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 313

Organizers
  • Min Kyung An, Sam Houston State University
  • Lei Chen, Sam Houston State University
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of sensor devices, also called wireless sensor nodes, deployed on sensing fields. WSNs have been hugely welcomed into our lives with the capabilities of the sensor nodes to communicate among sensor nodes, to monitor/sense nearby environmental conditions. Such capabilities have found applications in various areas including health (for example to monitor disabled patients), military (for computing, command, surveillance, targeting systems, communication), among others. Along with WSNs, networks of mobile devices (laptops, smartphones, etc.), so-called Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), have been widely used with the huge growth of the devices. Although there is no fixed infrastructure in such networks as the devices are free to join (or leave) the networks and move independently, they provide necessary functionalities for the networks using their capabilities to organize themselves dynamically without any central administrations. Applications for MANETs include emergency services (for example, disaster recovery, search/rescue operations), home/enterprise networking (for conferences, office wireless networking), and so on. This workshop brings together researchers working on the security and forensic aspects of the intersection of Wireless Sensor Networks and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.

TW-11: SmartGrid Resilience

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

Organizers
  • Deepa Kundur, University of Toronto
  • Angelos Marnerides, Liverpool John Moores University
  • Petros Spachos, University of Toronto
  • James Sterbenz, University of Kansas & Lancaster University (UK)
The provision of holistic resilience schemes to critical infrastructures such as the SG has recently considered a reasonable level of attention by official governmental bodies worldwide (e.g. NIST, US Dept. of Homeland Security, EU SmartGrid Task Force, EU ENISA) given recent environmental hazards and natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks that caused a great extend of damages to a number of US, EU and Asian power-grid infrastructures. Despite the surge of interest in specific resilience sub-domains such as cyber-physical security, there have not yet been any active directions towards the composition of holistic resilience schemes. Hence, the aim of the proposed workshop is to bring together researchers working in the broad area of resilience in Smart Grids (SGs). Resilience is defined as the ability of the SG to provide an acceptable level of service to the end consumer in the face of various challenges. Hence, the domain of resilience covers a range of issues related with the defense, detection, diagnosis and remediation of challenges initiated in the cyber and power infrastructure of the SG as well as with its recovery and refinement. The focus of the workshop will be on communication, networking and system-oriented techniques that tackle challenges initiated on the various networked components composing the communication infrastructure of the SG that directly affect the high-level functions of the demand-response (DR) model, smart metering, electric vehicles (i.e. automated (dis)-charging based on dynamic pricing signals), outage management, distributed energy resources and cyber-security. Given the diversity of heterogeneous environments (e.g. sensor networks, HAN networks, Advanced Metering Infrastructure) integrated in modern SG deployments, the emerging technologies incorporated in each as well as external factors (e.g. environmental conditions) there is still a challenging gap regarding the composition of holistic resilience schemes. Therefore, the workshop, where researchers working on emerging problems on different sectors of the SG share their latest results, formulate new problems from both communication, networking and data analytics perspectives, and create awareness about their practical significance with respect to the overall resilience of the SG, is therefore of great significance

TW-12: Wireless Networking, Control & Positioning for Unmanned Autonomous

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Aqua 310

Organizers
  • Jonathan How, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Yasamin Mostofi, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Ronald Raulefs, German Aerospace Center (DLR)
  • Dirk Slock, EURECOM
  • Christian Wietfeld, TU Dortmund University
  • Henk Wymeersch, Chalmers University of Technology
Unmanned autonomous systems are increasingly used in a large number of contexts to support humans in dangerous and difficult-to-reach environments. In order to fulfill particularly challenging tasks, next-generation cellular networks will enable cooperation of a broad range of mobile devices, including autonomous or human-controlled devices with varying capabilities to communicate and interact with other devices. Visionary scenarios foresee unmanned vehicles to be organized in networked teams and even swarms. This vision can be applied to a wide range of applications, e.g., autonomous driving including platooning and traffic control, exploration for search-and-rescue missions, and factory automation. The communication subsystem needs to provide highly reliable and delay-tolerant control links as well as data links. Unmanned vehicles also offer the capability to form ad-hoc wireless networks, for example to facilitate temporary hot spots and compensate network outages in case of public events and emergencies. The navigation sub-system musts provide relative positioning information with sub-meter accuracy and very low latency (~1 ms). The steering and control unit needs to be tightly coupled with the communications and navigation subsystem to ensure proper decisions even with imperfect local information. The focus of the workshop will be solely on projects and research aiming at civilian applications. This sixth edition of the workshop aims to cover the most recent results of various international research projects on new communications networks enabling the efficient control and context-awareness of teams of unmanned vehicles/systems operating on the ground, in the air, underwater, and in space scenarios.

TW-13: 5G Heterogeneous and Small Cell Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 17:15 • Indigo C

Organizers
  • Ming Ding, National Information and Communications Technology Australia
  • Ismail Güvenç, Florida International University
  • David López-Pérez, Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent
In recent years, with the advent of more easy-to-use and powerful mobile user equipment (UEs) such as smartphones and tablets, and with the development of more appealing Internet applications, mobile data traffic has been increasing in an exponential manner. This trend is expected to continue during the next decade. In this context, heterogeneous and small cell networks (HetSNets), which are characterized by a large number of network nodes with different transmit power levels and radio frequency coverage areas, including macrocells, remote radio heads, microcells, picocells, femtocells and relay nodes, have attracted much momentum in the wireless industry and research community. They have also gained the attention of standards bodies such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), overseeing the development of the LTE/LTE-Advanced standards, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), overseeing the development of Mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX). HetSNets have also been the major focus in the research and development efforts for emerging 5G wireless networks. However, the impending worldwide deployments of HetSNets bring about not only opportunities but also challenges. Despite many accomplishments in HetSNets development and deployment in the last few years, many technical challenges to efficient rollouts of HetSNets remain. Among these are the co-existence and inter-working of mixed-type neighbouring and/or overlapping cells, inter-cell interference and mobility management, front-haul and backhaul provisioning, energy saving issues, self-organization, and capacity enhancements through multi-flow technologies and coordinated multiple input multiple output (MIMO) operations. These challenges need to be addressed in order for HetSNets to deliver on their promise. This calls for a thorough reappraisal of contemporary wireless network technologies, such as network architecture, protocol designs, spectrum allocation strategies, radio access management mechanisms, etc. In order to do so, those in the wireless industry, academia and even end-users need to better understand the technical details and the full potential of HetSNets. This workshop will bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to 5G HetSNets.

TW-14: Emerging Technologies for 5G Wireless Cellular Networks

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 17:15 • Indigo CG

Organizers
  • Huseyin Arslan, Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey
  • Lingjia Liu, University of Kansas, USA
  • Tommy Svensson, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  • Halim Yanikomeroglu, Carleton University, Canada
  • Wei Yu, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Charlie (Jianzhong) Zhang, Samsung Research America at Dallas, USA
  • Peiying Zhu, Huawei Technologies, Canada
The wireless cellular network has been one of the most successful communications technologies of the last three decades. The advent of smartphones and tablets over the past several years has resulted in an explosive growth of data traffic over the cellular network not seen in previous generations. With the proliferation of more smart terminals communicating with servers and each other via broadband wireless networks, numerous new applications have also emerged to take advantage of wireless connectivity. As the fourth generation (4G) networks, namely 3GPP LTE-A, mature and become great commercial success, the research community is now increasingly looking beyond 4G and into future 5G technologies both in standardization body such as 3GPP, and in research programs such as METIS 2020 and EU Horizon2020. Fundamental requirements that have emerged for radio access networks in the 2020 and beyond era include: 1) Capabilities for supporting massive capacity and massive connectivity; 2) Support for an increasingly diverse set of services, application and users – all with extremely diverging requirements for work and life; 3) Flexible and efficient use of all available non-contiguous spectrum for wildly different network deployment scenarios. These requirements bring a number of challenges to the design of future wireless networks, including the capability of supporting diverse traffic characteristics, massive connectivity due to massive number of devices (including machine-type terminals), and the densification and heterogeneity of such networks. This workshop will be a venue to brainstorm on and to identify the emerging concepts, technologies, and analytical tools for 5G cellular networks. We aim to bring together leading researchers in both academia and industry, and to provide a forum for researchers from diverse backgrounds to share their views on what 5G should be and to have an open dialogue on the future of wireless research. The goal is to identify key 5G technology drivers that can deliver significant capacity, coverage and user-experience benefits.

TW-15: Localization and Tracking: Indoors, Outdoors and Emerging Networks

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 313

Organizers
  • Michael Buehrer, Virginia Tech
  • Harpreet Dhillon, Virginia Tech
  • Howard Huang, Alcatel-Lucent
  • Klaus Witrisal, Graz University of Technology
Localization and tracking technologies for low-power devices such as sensors or handset devices are critical for a wide range of applications such as sensor networks, E911, location-based services, indoor and outdoor navigation, location-dependent advertisement, and location-based smartphone apps. In general, technologies for these “conventional” use cases will continue to advance as a result of improved algorithms, better fusion of multiple tracking modes, new network architectures and improved sensor technologies. Within the context of these evolving technologies, a number of recent events and trends will likely drive changes in the goals of tracking and localization research. The goal of this workshop is to highlight recent advances in tracking and localization technologies through a series of invited and refereed presentations, with a focus on the timely topics such as z-axis localization, 5G/HetNets, and IoT localization.

TW-16: Enabling Technologies in Future Wireless Local Area Network

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Indigo 202B

Organizers
  • Nihar Jindal, Broadcom
  • Joonsuk Kim, Vice chair of IEEE802.11ac
  • Kwang Soon Kim, Yonsei University
  • Young-Chai Ko, Korea University
  • Pengfei Xia, Tongji University
The purpose of the workshop is to gather academic and industrial researchers/engineers to share their views on requirements, and to discuss enabling technologies for the coming wireless local area networks (WLAN). Wireless LANs based upon IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ad standards are gaining wider acceptance in the market for their simplicity, cost effectiveness, and the ever increasing demands for economical high speed connectivity in enterprises, hotels, hospitals, airports, shopping complexes and almost every places of business or leisure. More recently, IEEE802.11ax task group (TG) is launched to address the high data rate, high efficiency requirements in dense user environments. At another extreme, next generation 60GHz (NG60) study group (SG) was created to support wireless data/video transmissions at a few tens of Gbps data rate, using the 60 GHz millimeter wave (mmwave) frequency band. To address the ever increasing demands for high data rate and high efficiency in WLAN, new enabling technologies fitted to WLAN environments are needed. Some advanced technologies already adopted in the cellular networks, such as OFDMA, multi-user MIMO, are not directly applicable to WLAN due to the unlicensed nature of the spectrum, and appropriate modifications may be needed. This workshop will bring together academic researchers and industrial professionals to identify technical challenges, discuss potential enabling technologies, and finally establish a practical guideline for next generation WLAN development.

TW-17: Networking and Collaboration Issues for the Internet of Everything

Sunday, 6 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Sapphire 410

Organizers
  • Vangelis Angelakis, Linköping University
  • Elias Tragos, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
  • Charalampos Patrikakis, Technological Educational Institute of Piraeus
  • Georgios Loukas, University of Greenwich
The proliferation of new services in the mobile market is driving the QoS requirements ever higher (in terms of performance indicators spanning throughput, delays, network coverage etc). Meanwhile, a multitude of battery- hungry mobile devices are either connected to the Internet or are about to be. Following this trend, physical objects along with services are gaining a central role, shaping the Internet of Things. At larger scales, buildings and whole cities are also becoming smarter, embracing a wide range of technologies to enhance and improve the quality of everyday living, contributing at the same time to the global target of reducing energy consumption. Involved technologies within the IoT span from WSAN (Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks), and M2M communication, to security frameworks and service models, while next generation wireless access networks will be composed of flexible, multi-tier, and scalable heterogeneous architectures, incorporating small cells, offloading techniques, and optimized protocols for cellular IoT. Thus, an important challenge in future wireless communications is how to design and run cost efficient networks that optimize the key performance indicators to support the requirements of these services. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers focusing on resource management and optimization within the context of heterogeneous wireless networking. The technical focus will be focused on the communications aspects and key enabling technologies in future HetNets for IoT, especially M2M communications and offloading, as well as applications with a core focus on Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).

TW-18: Heterogeneous Carrier Communication Technologies (HetCarrierCom)

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 8:15 – 12:00 • Aqua 309

Organizers
  • Mohammed Atiquzzaman, University of Oklahoma
  • Shin-Ming Cheng, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
  • Marios Kountouris, Huawei Technologies
  • Shao-Yu Lien, National Formosa University
  • Chih-Cheng Tseng, National Ilan University
The explosion in the number of mobile users and the use of diverse bandwidth-hungry wireless applications have resulted in an exponential growth in the demand for wireless access to the Internet. As a consequence, not only the volume of mobile data traffic is overwhelming the capacity of existing wireless communication networks, but the required high data rates also drains the limited radio resources. Theoretically, one of the possible solutions to this problem is to broaden the amount of allocated spectrum. However, spectrum for commercial use solely in the conventional licensed bands or ISM unlicensed bands is no longer sufficient to support the practical and constantly increasing needs. This in turn decreases the feasibility of this solution and renders the interests of network operators. Hence, heterogeneous carrier communication technologies have received lots of attention from both industry and academia for data communications and telecommunications in recent years. Heterogeneous carrier communication technologies enable the network to operate not only on homogeneous carriers, but also on carriers with different characteristics. For example, in licensed-assisted access (LAA) of LTE (also known as LTE-U), both licensed and unlicensed carriers are involved in, where licensed carriers are used for control channels, while unlicensed carriers are used for data channels. For IEEE 802.11af, communication is no longer carried out on ISM bands and are extended to TV bands. For IEEE 802.11ac (also known as the fifth generation of WiFi), a higher order modulation (256-QAM), wider bandwidth (up to 160MHz), and 8X8 MIMO are adopted for indoor communications. Furthermore, communication using mmWave carriers has recently received considerable attention due to the possible advantages of using wider bandwidth and the potential significant gains. Although these innovative technologies provide new communication paradigms enjoying wider bandwidth and/or stronger signal strength, they also come with challenging technical issues to overcome. The goal of this workshop is consequently to bring together academic and industrial researchers in an effort to identify and discuss the major technical challenges, recent results, and future research issues related to existing and emerging technologies for heterogeneous carrier communication.

TW-19: Advances in Software Defined Radio Access Networks and Context-aware Cognitive Networks 2015 (SDRANCAN-2015)

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Indigo 202B

Organizers
  • Jaime Lloret, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
  • Danda Rawat, Georgia Southern University
Future generation wireless systems will require a paradigm shift in how they are networked, organized, configured, optimized, and recovered automatically based on their operating situations. With the emergence of Software Defined Access Networks and Context-Aware Cognitive Networks (SDRANCAN), wireless users could get seamless wireless connectivity and services regardless of the frequency bands that they are using as a backhaul. Context-Aware cognitive networks provides dynamic adaptive services and applications for wireless users through automatic configuration of devices and their parameters, systems, and services based on the users’ contexts. We believe that this workshop is important for future wireless networks and will help to bridge the gap between traditional wireless networks and future wireless networks through both software defined access networks and context-aware cognitive networks. SDRANCAN-2015 will serve as a forum for researchers from academia, government and industries to exchange ideas, present new results and provide future visions on these topics.

TW-20: Ultra-Low Latency and Ultra-High Reliability in Wireless Communications

Thursday, 10 December 2015 • 13:30 – 17:15 • Indigo 202A

Organizers
  • Peter Fertl, BMW Group Research and Technology
  • Andreas Festag, TU Dresden
  • Patrick Marsch, Nokia Networks
  • Preben Mogensen, AAU
  • Hans Schotten, University of Kaiserslautern
  • Savas Kaya, Ohio University
  • Avinash Kodi, Ohio University
  • David Matolak, University of South Carolina
Future wireless communications will not only be used for content distribution, where typically throughput per area is the most relevant KPI, but more and more for applications where the system capacity may not may the critical point, but rather stringent latency and/or reliability requirements. Examples for such applications are - User-specific 3D video rendering and augmented reality - Remote control (e.g. remote robotics, surgery, the tactile Internet etc.) - Wireless automation of production facilities - Vehicular traffic efficiency and safety - eHealth - Mobile gaming Effectively, many future applications will require an end-to-end latency of a few ms, which is at least an order of magnitude less than what we experience in today's cellular systems such as LTE-A. In addition, the field of wireless automation and control will in some cases require reliabilities on the order of 10-9, again several orders of magnitude away from state-of-the-art technology. Clearly, optimizing wireless communications for latency and reliability is a complete paradigm change in wireless systems design, and has to be reflected in various technology fields such as e.g. air interface design, signal processing on both device and infrastructure side, network infrastructure and architecture considerations, control and user plane design, session management and protocol stack design. The workshop shall provide a platform for technical experts from the radio, core network and application side to elaborate on particular latency and/or reliability requirements of future applications, provide specific concepts or building blocks to significantly reduce end-to-end latency and/or increase reliability in wireless communications systems, or develop concepts for a flexible accommodation of traffic with stringent latency and reliability requirements in parallel to traffic with e.g. high throughput requirements.
The topics also include communication for attocell-scale systems, which encompasses wireless networks on chips (WiNoCs), chip-to-chip, and board-to-board communications, with link distances spanning from less than a centimeter to a meter. The primary application for these communication systems is high performance computing (HPC) interconnections. Hence this research requires coordinated expertise across multiple areas, including physical and medium access communications, computer architecture, and transceiver device technology. Both fundamental research and industrial development and their reduction to practice will be addressed.

TW-21: Green Standardization and Industry Issues for ICT and Relevant Technologies (GSICT)

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

Organizers
  • Gilbert Buty, Alcatel-Lucent
  • Mohammad Chaudhry, University of Toronto, and Soptimizer
  • Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Research Institute
  • Thierry Klein, Alcatel-Lucent
  • Venkatesha Prasad, Delft University of Technology
  • Christos Verikoukis, Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia
  • Jinsong Wu, Universidad de Chile
  • Shengjie Zhao, Tongji University
This workshop is to collect results and visions of standards, regulations and public policies on global green revolutions relevant to information and communication technologies (ICT) and other relevant issues, including both the impact of ICT on the environments and the impact of environments on ICT. This workshop will exchange views on issues of strategic importance such as environmental protections, resource efficiency, climate changes, and energy efficiency, and how ICT can help boost the transition to a environmentally-friendly economy. Environmental sustainability for the ICT sector has impacted and will continue impacting the industry's reaction to the outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The current world would not survive without information and communication technologies, whose widespread use has changed people's lives dramatically and boosted economic growth. However, the very success of these technologies has made them a growing contributor to various environmental impacts. At the same time, they may offer ways of reducing negative environmental impacts in other industries such as water resource management, air pollution reduction, energy generation, building and transport. This workshop may also provide guidance on green ICT procurement, detailing green principles to be applied when procuring goods, products and services. Another issue considered in this workshop is greening ICT supply chains relating to conflict minerals, and the way the ICT industry is managing its supply chain in that context. This workshop may also investigate the overall sustainability of lifestyle choices, a number of companies may have responded by providing consumers with information on the eco-impact of the products they buy and use.