Globecom 2013 took place in Atlanta, GA between Dec 9 and 13 2013. As the biggest conference in wireless communications, many experts from both industry and academia attended the conference. Several highlights in the conference are:
- Industry forums were very informative and several of them were very successful. For example there were five panel discussions related to B4G/5G technologies and two of them, one on Wednesday morning and another Wednesday afternoon, attracted more than two hundred audience. The panelists include leaders from Ericsson, Intel, CMCC, Huawei, Samsung, etc. In general the goal is to extend the existing performances of 4G networks regarding peak rate, cell edge, cell average spectral efficiency, mobility, energy and cost efficiency, simultaneous connections, and latency into those for B4G/5G communications. The gaps between4G and B4G/5G vary slightly depending on companies. Several interesting technologies proposed are full-duplex communications, large MIMO, C/U plane split, exploitation of context awareness, device sharing, etc. In the 5G discussions, almost the set of people/companies were invited in these panels. So there were many repetitions of the same stories and the majority of their views were pretty much aligned. In addition to 5G discussions, several other industry panels discussed smart grid, MMW, network function virtualiation, spectrum management, M2M, Next Generation Wi-Fi, and so on.
- There were also many tutorials this year. Compared to about ten in the past years, there were twenty half-day tutorials this year, given on Monday and Friday. Many of the tutorials were new ones. The tutorials cover topics from interference alignment, hetnet, to smart grid, etc. The detailed list can be found here: http://www.ieee-globecom.org/2013/tutorials.html#.UtZ0TfRDuWM I also gave a tutorial related to energy and spectrum efficient wireless networks on Friday morning.
- There were three days of technical symposia. There were only five MIMO sessions and four OFDM sessions, clearly indicating reducing research efforts in these areas. There was one session about full-duplex MIMO and one about massive MIMO. While many companies suggested large MIMO as one potential technology in 5G, there is quite limited academic research effort in this area, indicating being either well understood or still at the early phase. The big topics nowadays are: 9 sessions about cooperative communications, 6 relay, 11 CR, 14 security, 12 EE/green. Several new topics: 1 D2d, 1 M2M, 1SDN, etc. There was also only one session about dense wireless networks, which I chaired. And in this session, only two papers from Stanford were about dense networks. Well, absolutely the infant phase…
