Energy efficiency in 5G mobile networks

Aarne Mämmelä, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Slides

Abstract

5G systems will be used in the 2020’s. Moore’s exponential law has been slowing down since about 2000 and it will eventually undergo a thermal noise death in about 2020-2030. The switching energy of CMOS electronics will approach the thermal noise spectral density. Future networks are expected to carry 1000 times more mobile data in ten years but the energy efficiency of CMOS technology is expected to improve only by a factor of 10 when before about 2000 the energy efficiency improved by a factor of 100 in ten years. The technology trends and fundamental limits in the physical layer will have a direct effect on all upper layers. Networks do not only consume energy in transmission in power amplifiers but also in computation in algorithms and protocols. Computation energy will be more important in small cells that are expected to be used in places where user density is high. The author’s background is in the physical layer.

Bio

Aarne Mämmelä (aarne.mammela@vtt.fi) was born in Vihanti, Finland in 1957. He received the degrees of Master of Science in Engineering, Licentiate in Technology, and Doctor of Technology (all with honors) from the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland in 1983, 1988, and 1996, respectively. His doctoral thesis was on diversity (RAKE) receivers in fast fading multipath channels. From 1982 to 1993 he was with the Telecommunication Laboratory at the University of Oulu and carried out research on adaptive algorithms in spread-spectrum systems in wireless communications systems. From 1987 he gave several undergraduate and postgraduate courses as a part-time teacher, acting associate professor, or acting professor in different areas of the physical layer in wireless communications. He visited the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany in 1990-1991 as a visiting research scientist. He joined the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in Oulu, Finland in 1993. Since 1996 he has been a research professor of digital signal processing in wireless communications and in 2001 he received a tenure position. He visited the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 1996-1997 as a postdoctoral research scientist. During 2000-2010 he was a docent (adjunct professor) at the Helsinki University of Technology (merged later to Aalto University) and since 2004 he has been a docent at the University of Oulu. During 2001-2011 he gave regularly a major part of the lectures in a postgraduate course on research methodology at the University of Oulu, finally offered for the whole Faculty of Technology. During the last years about 50-60 students annually attended the course. He has given the lectures several times at the Helsinki University of Technology and once also at the University of Modena in Italy. He is especially interested in research methods in engineering, philosophy and history of science and engineering, systems analysis and engineering, resource (energy) efficiency, and adaptive estimation and synchronization problems.

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Virtualization techniques: opportunities for fixed/mobile convergence

Fabrice Guillemin, Orange Labs, France

Slides

Abstract

Fixed/mobile convergence is a recurrent problem in the design of telecommunication networks. Mobile and fixed networks have been developed in the past few decades independently one of each other, mobile networks relying on highly centralized platforms and a few gateways to interconnect with the Internet for data traffic. The expectations of users with the widespread of tablets, smartphones, etc. are however rapidly changing and there is clearly a need to be able to seamlessly move from one network to another without session interruption. This is all the more essential as users massively use radio technologies to connect to the Internet, for instance through WiFi, cellular connections being in general able to ensure radio coverage between two WiFi hotspots. One major obstacle to fixed/mobile convergence is that networks are built upon functions hosted by dedicated hardware (e.g., the functions of the evolved packet core for cellular networks). With the emergence of virtualization techniques, it becomes possible to instantiate functions on standard hardware, making it possible to host on the same piece of equipment or in the cloud cellular and fixed access functions. In this talk, we exemplify this opportunity by describing the design of a convergent gateway aimed at realizing fixed/mobile convergence, such a gateway being instantiated by a network operating system.

Bio

Fabrice Guillemin graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in 1987 and from Telecom Paris in 1989. He received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Rennes in 1992 and defended his habilitation thesis at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in 1999. Since 1989, he has been with the R&D center of France Telecom (former CNET) in Lannion. He participated in the Metropolis project (metrology of Internet traffic) and was the project leader of the ASIA (lightweight signaling for the Internet over ATM) and OSCAR (security in overlay networks) funded by the French national agency for research. He also participated in the European projects Evergrow and 4WARD (Internet of the future). Fabrice Guillemin was also involved in the standardization of the ATM technology (ATM Forum and ITU). His research interests are in queuing theory and probability applied to congestion control and traffic metrology in telecommunication networks (Internet and mobile networks). Fabrice Guillemin is currently leading a project on the evolution of the control planes of networks at Orange Labs.

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Storms in Mobile Networks: Modelling, Detection and Mitigation

Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, UK

Abstract

Network attacks are designed to be simple to set up for the attacker, and ideally they exploit deficiencies in the network that is being attacked. A good example are the storm attacks against mobile networks that actually exploit the intrinsic characteristics of the network's normal operations. In this paper we will show how storm attacks can be set up, how they can be mitigated against, and how they could be considerably attenuated if we could change some of the standards used in mobile telephony.

Bio

Professor Erol Gelenbe, Fellow of ACM and IEEE and recipient of the IFIP Silver Core Award in 1980, was born in Turkey where he obtained his undergraduate engineering degree from METU. He is a member of the Science Academies of Belgium, Hungary, Poland and Turkey, and a member of the French National Academy of Technologies. He holds the Gabor Chair Professorship in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, where he is Head of the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group. He currently coordinates the EU Project NEMESYS on mobile network security, and is also active in Green IT.

Information Resilience through User-Assisted Caching in Disruptive Content-Centric Networks

Vasilis Sourlas (University College London, United Kingdom); Leandros Tassiulas (Yale University, USA); Ioannis Psaras and George Pavlou (University College London, United Kingdom)