PIMRC 2012, Focus on the user’s behavior

I attended PIMRC 2012 which was held in Sydney on 9-12 September. The main focus of the plenary and keynote sessions was laid on user’s behavior and how this affects the mobile networks in the future.

The first talk was given by Gunther Ottendorfer who is the managing director of Optus networks in Australia. He discussed more about the increase of the mobile phone usage in everyday activates of people such as music and videos and new emerging apps which heavily affect the network signaling. Customers adapt to new apps rapidly and these mobile apps are driving the data usage which directly affects the mobile networks. For customer of future, he believes we have to handle spectrum efficiently and pay more attention to the role of small cells. In order to handle data service faster, re-farming of spectrum and indoor coverage have an active role. And he sees a great potential in Time Division for LTE services.

The Second talk was given by Scott Nilsson, the vice president of Alcatel-lucent. He talked on the 25-times growth of mobile traffic which will continue to 200-times more by the end of this decade. He believes that we are in the middle of data raising storm, and it is already too late because the demand is out there. He believes we need spectral and spatial efficiency to deploy smaller cells, and that the HetNet cellular network is important although the operational issues should be addressed more than the technical aspects to rise above the data storms.

From a different perspective, Dr. Håkan Eriksson, the CEO of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, thinks that with the change in user behaviors we should be more aware of the importance of new and efficient ways of charging our customers.

From the academia’s point of view, the talk given by Prof. Arogyaswami Paulraj was in the same line of thought with the concerns that had been raised by the industry speakers. In addition, he emphasized on the importance of hyper MIMO as a technology for meeting the capacity demand.

I myself presented a paper on the “performance analysis of relay-assisted cognitive radio systems with superposition coding” in the second day of the conference and followed interesting papers in different areas to get more perspective on important future challenges :)

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