My posting on the second day of IEEE PIMRC 2013 will focus on two keynote speeches in the morning.
The first talk was given by Wen Tong at Huawei. When it comes to keynote speech, he is a “usual suspect”, if you will. He has made quite a few talks about Huawei’s future strategy in international conferences. This time, the title of his talk was “an outlook of 5G wireless”
In his view, 5G is for massive capacity, for massive connectivity, and for all spectrum access. This is not a surprise any more. The wireless industry has already reached a good consensus about the requirements for future wireless, although the actual numbers might differ.
So, what’s still interesting is their approaches to solution. He mentioned “a single and unified air interface working for all bands (from legacy spectrum to high frequency, e.g., 90+ GHz). At the same time, he also talked about “an adaptive air-interface and radio parameters for various applications”. Just adding one more, Cloud RAN is considered to be one of key features of the future system.
Summing up these pieces, I had an impression that Huawei prefers a one-size-fits-all system which is flexible enough for many purposes and is under central optimization and management. Maybe, my interpretation is simply wrong. However, it would be good to think what would be the best way to handle diverse requirements, from billions of sensors waking up one a week to handheld devices downloading Giga Byte per day.
The second talk was by Heinrich Stuttgen at NEC Europe. He gave a nice overview about software defined networking. Although I learned a lot about this topic, I am still new to internetworking, and thus I cannot really comment on his talk.
While listening to his talk, I thought about the relationship between wireless access and Internet technology. We, wireless researchers, do not really think about networking in our problem formulation. Will there be a need to consider the wireless and networking together? I don’t have an immediate answer. Good to think further.
