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About the conference:

The Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) is a semiannual international academic conference on wireless communications. It is organized by the IEEE’s Vehicular Technology Society. Recent VTCs have been attended by about 600-700 people. The conference focuses mainly on the physical layer and medium access control layer (PHY and MAC) of wireless systems [1].

This year in a glance:

The 2015 IEEE 81st Vehicular Technology Conference was held 11–14 May 2015 at the Technology and Innovation Center, University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. In this year the VTC program consists of 5 plenaries, 7 Panels, 16 workshops, 2 industry sessions by Mathworks and national instruments, and 15 tracks covering all relevant technical areas, as mentioned here.

My contribution:

I (with my colleagues Haris and Yanpeng) are here to present our latest research works. Yesterday, I have presented the following paper: Lifetime-Aware Scheduling and Power Control for M2M Communications in LTE Networks [2] which you can download it from here and the presentation file from here.

I also attended the tutorial on –Optimizing 5G Networks for Energy-Efficiency: Dense or Massive MIMO or Both?– which was offered by Emil Björnson, Linköping University and Luca Sanguinetti, University of Pisa. You can find more information about the tutorial in here and you can download the slides here. As you can see in the slides, they have proposed to use massive MIMO in small cells. Emil has presented some parts of this tutorial in one of the wireless @ KTH seminars.

Some points from the conference:

1) The first interesting point was that the keynote speakers from Ericsson on 11 MAY, Huawei on 12 May, and Samsung on 13 May presented their timelines toward 5G.

In the sequel, you can see the timeline from the Samsung:

It shows that 5G will be appeared in the near future, however, there were different views about what is 5G and how the current infrastructure will evolve toward 5G.

2) An interesting talk was given by Wonil Roh, the vice president of Samsung, about key enabling technologies and recent R&D results for 5G. In this presentation, he showed how new techniques will satisfy the need for low latency and high traffic load in terms of number of connected devices and data-rate requirements. You can see the main points in the following figure:

I recommend you strongly to read the white paper from the Samsung which describes their views about 5G. The presentation by Dr. Roh was based on this white paper which can be downloaded from here.

3) Based on the presentation by Stefan Parkvall from Ericsson, The Road to 5G, the energy efficiency for M2M communications will be provided with shorter TTI length in 5G. He mentioned that in their testbed for 5G in 2014, they have used TTI=0.2 msec.

4) mmWave communications and its contribution in 5G were very important topics in most keynote presentations.

5) New waveform design was an interesting topic in this conference. The QAM-FBMC waveform design is expected to provide more spectral efficiency by decreasing the level of out-band energy as in the following image.

One may want to compare this waveform design with one even more interesting waveform design for 5G in here.

6) Among different use cases for 5G, healthy aging was mentioned as a growing market. David Soldani, VP of European Research Center, mentioned that there are lots of opportunities in this field as in the upcoming years a significant portion of the society will be the ones who are older than 65 years.

References:

[1]. Wikipedia contributors, Vehicular Technology Conference, [Online]. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_Technology_Conference

[2]. A. Azari, G. Miao, ‘Lifetime-Aware Scheduling and Power Control for M2M Communications in LTE Networks,’ VTC spring, 2015

[3]. Samsung Electronics, 5G vision, [Online]. Available: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/networks/insights/white-paper