Workshops 

FULL-DAY WORKSHOPS

Sunday, 1 April 2012, 9:00 – 12:30, 14:00 – 17:30

W1. Future Green Communications

Organizers:

Emilio Calvanese Strinati, CEA-LETI, France
Eric Masera, SAGEMCOM Broadband, France
Mérouane Debbah, SUPELEC, France
Suresh Goyal, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, USA

Abstract:

The environmental and energy efficiency issues became more obvious to a larger audience in the last decade and recently several ambitious initiatives were launched worldwide to tackle these issues. Recently, increasing maturity of mobile technology in combination with the growing amount of equipment deployed each year has woken up the need of innovating in the field of energy efficient communications. In the last decade telecommunication has experienced a tremendous success causing proliferation and demand for ubiquitous heterogeneous broadband mobile wireless communications. Up to now, innovation has mainly targeted to improve wireless networks coverage and capacity while meeting the QoS for users admitted in the system. Nowadays, the number of mobile subscribers equals more than half the global population. Forecast on telecommunication market assume an increase in subscribers, per subscriber’s data rate and, the roll out of additional base stations for next generation mobile networks. The undesired consequence is the growth of wireless network’s energy consumption which will cause an increase of the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and, impose more and more challenging operational cost for operators. Communication energy efficiency represents indeed an alarming bottleneck in the telecommunication growth paradigm. The home environment is also a challenge for energy efficiency, as fixed broadband becomes pervasive and services proliferate on a variety of boxes linked together by a plurality of technologies. Optimization at the device level as well as a system approach becomes necessary to deliver service continuity while reducing the overall energy consumes by the home LAN.

Program available here

W2. Broadband Femtocell Technologies: “Paving the Way to Heterogeneous Cellular Networks”

Organizers:

Thierry Lestable, SAGEMCOM SAS, France
Frank Zdarsky, NEC, UK
David Lopez-Perez, King’s College London, UK
Guillaume de la Roche, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Abstract:

Heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNet), in which a large number of low-power nodes such as picocells, femtocells and relay nodes overlay traditional macrocell networks, have been heralded as the most promising way to enhance network performance and meet future customer needs. By deploying more network infrastructures, cellular networks will be made closer to end-users, thus enhancing radio link quality and spatial spectrum reuse in a cost-effective manner. Among the lower-power nodes, femtocells play a key role due to their user-deployed, low-cost, low-power and low electromagnetic (EM) exposure characteristics, as well as their advantages in providing indoor coverage. Hence, femtocell technologies may accelerate the cost-effective provision of ubiquitous broadband services by convergence between fixed and wireless broadband. This full day workshop aims to bring together internationally leading academic and industrial perspectives, and discuss recent progress in femtocell technologies. The list of promising new developments includes cooperative networks for interference mitigation in heterogeneous networks made of macro/pico/femto cells, extending the classical concept of indoor femtocells to outdoors, e.g., fixed relays in macrocells for enhancing coverage and cell-edge capacity, mobile femtocells in public transports, and self-organizing (SON) techniques for high capacity and optimum use of transmit power while minimizing OPEX and simplifying complexity for remote network management.

Program available here

W2 URL : http://www.kcl.ac.uk


W3. Internet of Things Enabling Technologies: “Embracing the M2M Communications and Beyond”

Organizers:

Angeliki Alexiou, University of Piraeus, Greece
Djelal Raouf, SAGEMCOM Energy & Telecom, France
Yan Zhang, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
Harold Liu, IBM Research, China

Abstract:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel design paradigm rapidly gaining wide global attention from academia, industries, and governments. The fundamental concept is to emphasize the ubiquitous computing among global networked machines and physical objects, denoted as things, such as RFID tags, sensors, actuators, machine-to-machine (M2M) devices, mobile phones, etc. It covers a wide scope of technologies including wireless/wired sensing, networking, computing and control, which together build feasible complex cyber physical systems (CPS) to support diverse applications, including smart grid, e-health, intelligent transportation, and logistics, etc. The proposed International Workshop on the Internet of Things Enabling Technologies (IoT-ET), in conjunction with IEEE WCNC 2012 is a new event focusing on key enablers for IoT, especially M2M communications and networking, that aims at providing a forum that brings together researchers from academia, practitioners from industry, standardization bodies, and government to meet and exchange ideas on recent research work, point out the directions for future research, and seek collaboration opportunities on all aspects of the IoT enabling technologies. The goal of this workshop is to promote borderless discussions and identify suitable strategies and solutions to enable effective and efficient IoT system performance. We are looking for papers that present new techniques, introduce new methodologies, propose new research directions, or discuss strategies, including standardization and regulation for resolving open problems spanning all aspects of an IoT system, such as scalability, wide-area coverage, sustainability, energy-efficiency, spectral-efficiency, heterogeneity, cooperation, and security. The focus will cover system-level solutions like software/hardware architectures, protocol-level solutions, and device and service management solutions. Furthermore, application-oriented demos and prototypes are also highly encouraged.

Program available here

W3 URL : http://iot-et2012.weebly.com


W4. 4G Mobile Radio Access Networks

Organizers:

Alexandre Gouraud, Orange Labs, France
Ronald Raulefs, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
Jonathan Duplicy, Agilent, Belgium

Abstract:

Within the past 20 years, data rates in mobile communications have been multiplied every five years by a factor of 10. However, compared to that, mobile network operators have observed a true explosion of data traffic within their networks only over the last few months. In order to ensure the economic viability of mobile network operators in mature markets, the average revenue per user (ARPU) has to remain the same, although the user expectations are growing in terms of data throughput and service experience, and data usage is becoming intensive due to the generalization of flat rates. This translates into the need to reduce the cost per transmitted bit. In addition, the network upgrades have to be smooth and make use as much as possible of the already deployed infrastructure in order to take advantage of the previous investments. But, for current and upcoming cellular technologies (e.g. HSPA, LTE R8), the achievable data rates are strongly dependent on the users’ positions in the network. In these systems, a considerable gap between cell-edge and cell-center performance is observed due to inter-cell interference, which poses the main limitation of state-of-the art mobile networks. As the physical nature of the propagation channel makes the throughput in the cell non-homogenous, the challenge for the design of next generation systems primarily relies on the ability to boost this average performance, especially for the benefits of cell-edge users.

Program available here

W4 URL : https://sites.google.com/site/artist4gworkshop


W5. Wireless Vehicular Communications and Networks

Organizers:

Raquel Morera, Verizon Technology, USA
Maode Ma, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Hamid Nafaa, University College Dublin, Ireland

Abstract:

With the increasing number of vehicles and rapid development of wireless technologies, vehicular communications, networks and systems are becoming more and more popular. This area of research is in its early stages and there is still much to be done in order to realize the vision of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The aim of vehicular communication systems, and thus ITS, is to improve traffic safety, protect environment by reducing traffic congestion and fuel consumption, and enable a plethora of new applications such as mobile infotainment and location-based services for mobile users. To facilitate both safety and non-safety applications, the integration of communications and computing technologies into vehicular and transportation systems becomes a must. These result in various types of cooperative vehicular communications and networks: intra-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-roadside (V2R), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. While many conferences and workshops provide a venue to present and discuss vehicular communication, network protocols and solutions, only few research works addressed issues related to measurements, modelling and experimentations in such systems. So, the primary objective of the WVCN workshop will be to discuss the issues related to these themes. The focus of this workshop is to serve as a forum to share new ideas/experiences in all experimental, measurement and modelling aspects of vehicular communications and networks, and facilitate discussions of key unresolved challenges in this area.

Program available here

W5 URL : http://carmesh.eu


HALF-DAY WORKSHOPS

Sunday Morning, 1 April 2012, 9:00 – 12:30

W6. Hybrid Optical Wireless Access Networks: “Opportunities and Challenges for 4G Cellular Backhauling”

Organizers:

Leonid Kazovski, Stanford University, USA
Ken Ichi Kitayama, Osaka University, Japan
Carmo Medeiros, University of Algarve, Portugal
Maurice Gagnaire, Telecom ParisTech, France

Abstract:

Fourth Generation (4G) radio cellular networks target data rates up to the Gbps range. Existing Radio Access Networks (RAN) are not suited to this evolution. A more efficient spectrum management and an increased cell density are required to achieve such capacities. The simple duplication of the base stations to provide broadband ubiquitous services is not economically viable in terms of investment and operation and management costs. Hybrid optical-wireless access systems based on Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technologies are viewed as a very promising solution to this problem. On one hand, analog RoF enables a mutualization of the multiplexing and radio signal processing equipment at a central remote site. On the other hand, digital RoF facilitates the design of distributed and intelligent antennas. It consists in replacing a single antenna at the center of a cell by multiple antennas at the scale of micro-cells. Similarly to analog RoF, digital RoF does not need a strict duplication of the multiplexing and radio signal equipment with antenna’s duplication. The objective of this workshop is to present and compare innovative approaches for Next-Generation RANs (NGRAN). It will favor discussions between academics, vendors and carriers involved in 4G radio mobile backhauling and RoF technologies and networks developments.

Program available here

W6 URL : http://howan.enst.fr


Sunday Afternoon, 1 April 2012, 14:00 – 17:30

W7. Wireless Cloud and White Space Oriented Networks

Organizers:

Hiroshi Harada (NICT) harada@nict.go.jp
Ying-Chang Liang (I2R,Singapore)

Abstract:

The objective of this full day workshop is to bring researchers together to share the current status of cognitive wireless networks and to discuss the future possible extensions and applications, especially in cloud computing and ubiquitous networking and operation in white space.
The workshop is open to submissions and possible topics are:
- Standardization activities on cognitive radio and white spaces (Qosmos, ETSI RRS, IEEE1900.7, IEEE 802.11af, 802.19.1, 802.22, 802.15.4 SGTV, Wireless Innovation Forum)
- Research results and future perspectives of wireless cloud and white space oriented networks
- Current status of R&D projects regarding cognitive wireless networks
- Prospects of cognitive wireless networks from major operator's viewpoint (Dynamic spectrum management, Resource optimization)

Program available here