Prof. Halim Yanikömeroǧlu, Professor, Carleton University, Canada

Integrated Terrestrial / Non-Terrestrial 6G Networks for Ubiquitous 3D Super-Connectivity

Abstract. Since the development of the 4G LTE standards around 2010, the research communities both in academia and industry have been brainstorming to predict the use cases and scenarios of 2020s, to determine the corresponding technical requirements, and to develop the enabling technologies, protocols, and network architectures towards the next-generation (5G) wireless standardization. This exploratory phase is winding down as the 5G standards are currently being developed with a scheduled completion date of late-2019; the 5G wireless networks are expected to be deployed globally throughout 2020s. As such, it is time to reinitiate a similar brainstorming endeavor followed by the technical groundwork towards the subsequent generation (6G) wireless networks of 2030s.
One reasonable starting point in this new 6G discussion is to reflect on the possible shortcomings of the 5G networks to-be-deployed. 5G promises to provide connectivity for a broad range of use-cases in a variety of vertical industries; after all, this rich set of scenarios is indeed what distinguishes 5G from the previous four generations. Many of the envisioned 5G use-cases require challenging target values for one or more of the key QoS elements, such as high rate, high reliability, low latency, and high energy efficiency; we refer to the presence of such demanding links as the super-connectivity.
However, the very fundamental principles of digital and wireless communications reveal that the provision of ubiquitous super-connectivity in the global scale — i.e., beyond indoors, dense downtown or campus-type areas — is infeasible with the legacy terrestrial network architecture as this would require prohibitively expensive gross over-provisioning. The problem will only exacerbate with even more demanding 6G use-cases such as UAVs requiring connectivity (ex: delivery drones), thus the 3D super-connectivity.
In this address, we will present a 5-layer vertical architecture composed of fully integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial layers for 6G networks of 2030s:
• Terrestrial HetNets with macro-, micro-, and pico-BSs
• Flying-BSs (aerial-/UAV-/drone-BSs); altitude: up to several 100 m
• High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) (floating-BSs); altitude: 20 km
• Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellites; altitude: 200–1,000 km
• Geostationary Orbit (GEO) satellites; altitude: 35,786 km
In the absence of a clear technology roadmap for the 2030s, the talk has, to a certain extent, an exploratory view point to stimulate further thinking and creativity. We are certainly at the dawn of a new era in wireless research and innovation; the next twenty years will be very interesting.

Biography. Halim Yanikomeroglu (F’17) was born in Giresun, Turkey, in 1968. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1990, and the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (now ECE) and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1992 and 1998, respectively.
During 1993–1994, he was with the R&D Group of Marconi Kominikasyon A.S., Ankara, Turkey. Since 1998 he has been with the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is now a Full Professor. His research interests cover many aspects of wireless technologies with a special emphasis on cellular networks. Dr. Yanikomeroglu has supervised 18 PhD and 28 MASc theses (all completed); several of his PhD students received various medals. He has coauthored 350+ peer-reviewed research papers including 115 in the IEEE journals; these publications have received 10,500+ citations. He has been one of the most frequent tutorial presenters in the leading international IEEE conferences (29 times). He has had extensive collaboration with large-scale (such as Huawei, Samsung, Blackberry, Nortel), medium-scale (such as Telus, DragonWave), and small-scale (such as Mapsted) companies as well as the government labs (such as Communications Research Centre of Canada). During 2012–2016, he led Canada’s largest academic-industrial collaborative research project on pre-standards 5G wireless research, sponsored by the Ontario Research Fund — Research Excellence (ORF—RE) program. Dr. Yanikomeroglu’s co¬llaborative research resulted in 24 granted patents (plus about 15 applied).
Dr. Yanikomeroglu is a Fellow of the IEEE with the citation «for contributions to wireless access architectures in cellular networks». He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communications Society and a Distinguished Speaker for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. He has been involved in the organization of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) from its inception in 1998 in various capacities including serving as a Steering Committee member for a decade and the Technical Program Chair/Co-Chair of WCNC 2004 (Atlanta), WCNC 2008 (Las Vegas), and WCNC 2014 (Istanbul). He was the General Co-Chair of the IEEE 72nd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2010-Fall) held in Ottawa, and the General Chair of the IEEE 86th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2017-Fall) held in Toronto. He has served in the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials. He was the Chair of one of the largest technical committees in IEEE, Technical Committee on Personal Communications (now called Wireless Communications Technical Committee and has 1,700+ members).
Dr. Yanikomeroglu is a recipient of the IEEE Ottawa Section Outstanding Educator Award in 2014, Carleton University Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award in 2010, the Carleton University Graduate Students Association Excellence Award in Graduate Teaching in 2010, and the Carleton University Research Achievement Award in 2009 and 2018. Dr. Yanikomeroglu spent the 2011–2012 academic year at TOBB U. of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey, as a Visiting Professor. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Prof. Antonio Iera, Professor, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Reggio Calabria, Italy)

Introducing a New Group Communication Method for 5G Networks

Abstract. This talk addresses an issues, deeply felt in the next generation Internet networks, which concerns the management of group communications among IoT devices. 5G application scenarios will be characterized, in fact, by the massive presence of IoT devices that together with human beings will be at the same time suppliers and users of services based on the exchange of huge amounts of data via group communications. These communications will put a strain on the existing primitives and their efficient management will be possible only if new paradigms will be made available. Starting from this assumption, during the talk a new architecture enabling multicast communications will be presented that exploits principles derived from the promising paradigms of Social Networks of devices and Software Defined Networking.

Biography. Antonio Iera graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria, Italy, and received a Master Diploma in Information Technology from CEFRIEL/Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Calabria. From 1994 to 1995 he has been with Siemens AG in Munich, Germany, and since 1997 with the University of Reggio Calabria, where he is currently a professor of Telecommunications and director of the Laboratory for Advanced Research into Telecommunication Systems (www.arts.unirc.it). His research interests include wireless and mobile 5G networks, RFID systems, and Internet of Things. He has published more than 300 papers in high-quality journals and conferences and has given several tutorials and invited speeches during international events on the topics of IoT, Social-IoT, and 5G networks.

Prof. Torsten Braun, Professor, University of Bern (Bern, Switzerland)

Abstract. The 5G network architecture is based on a service-oriented paradigm, where functions will be mainly be implemented as software components in virtualised environments. Several softwarisation concepts will serve as a basis for 5G networks. First, Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) will enable the implementation of network functions in virtual environments such as virtual machines or application containers. In such case, virtual environments will be separate from the base stations and antennas. The delay caused by physical separation and communication as well as scheduling in the virtualised environment must be minimised for delay sensitive applications. One approach is to keep the network function processing as close as possible to the base station, e.g., by co-locating or integrating them into the base station. This approach is targeted by the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) concept as being standardised by ETSI. In certain cases, however, it might make sense to distribute function processing. This is supported by Service Function Chaining (SFC) as being standardised by the IETF. The talk will introduce such NFV, MEC, and SFC concepts, present some recent research works in those areas as well as discuss future research opportunities.

Biography. Torsten Braun got his Ph.D. degree from University of Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1993. From 1994 to 1995 he has been a guest scientist at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France). From 1995 to 1997 he has been working at the IBM European Networking Centre Heidelberg (Germany) as a project leader and senior consultant. He has been a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and head of the research group ‘‘Communication and Distributed Systems” since 1998. He has been member of the SWITCH (Swiss education and research network) board of trustees since 2001. Since 2011, he has been vice president of the SWITCH foundation. Since 2017, he has been Vice Dean of the Faculty of Science at University of Bern.

Prof. Bernhard Rinner, Professor, University of Klagenfurt (Klagenfurt, Austria)

Multi-Drone Systems

Abstract. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — also called drones — are used with increasing interest in civil and commercial applications. Drones can fly routes in an autonomous manner and carry cameras for aerial photography. Research and development efforts have recently addressed drone systems for monitoring, surveillance, or disaster assistance. Small-scale multi-copters are of particular interest in this context due to their simple deployment, high maneuverability, and low costs. It is often beneficial to deploy a team of drones rather than a single drone, since multiple drones can explore areas faster.
In this talk I will give an overview of our research in multi-drone systems (uav.aau.at). I will present selected key achievements from our ten years’ research in this domain with an emphasis on communication, coordination and decision making. I will also show use cases of multi-drone systems.

Biography. Bernhard Rinner is professor at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria where he is heading the Pervasive Computing group. He is deputy head of the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems and served as vice dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences from 2008-2011. Before joining Klagenfurt he was with Graz University of Technology and held research positions at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and 1998/99.
His current research interests include embedded computing, sensor networks multi-robot systems and pervasive computing. Bernhard Rinner has been co-founder and general chair of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras and has served as chief editor of a special issue on this topic in The Proceedings of the IEEE. Currently, he is Associate Editor for Ad Hoc Networks Journal and EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems. Together with partners from four European universities, he has jointly initiated the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program on Interactive and Cognitive Environments (ICE). He is senior member of IEEE and member of the board of the Austrian Science Fund.

Prof. Giuseppe Araniti, Assistant Professor, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Reggio Calabria, Italy)

Exploiting Machine-Type Multicast Services for Providing Innovative Applications in 5G Networks

Abstract. The Internet of Things (IoT) will shortly be undergoing a major transformation from a sensor-driven paradigm to one that is heavily complemented by actuators, drones, and robots. In this field, machine-type communications (MTC) push towards the design of effective solutions to simultaneously deliver data of different size to a very large (and unpredictable) number of MTC/IoT devices. As a consequence, the number and variety of mobile multicast applications is growing at an unprecedented and unanticipated pace. This lecture focuses on the definition, design, and analysis of machine-type multicast service (MtMS). The different procedures that need to be redesigned for MtMS will be discussed and the most appropriate design drivers will be derived by analysing different use cases.

Biography. Giuseppe Araniti received the Laurea (2000) and the Ph.D. degree (2004) in Electronic Engineering from the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy. Since November 2005 he is an Assistant Professor on Telecommunications at University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, where he is a member of the Laboratory for Advanced Researches into Telecommunication Systems (ARTS). His researches activities are conducted by cooperating with several national and international research groups, from academia and industries, and the results of such researches are reported in more than 140 scientific publications. His major area of research is on 5G networks and it includes personal communications systems, enhanced wireless and satellite systems, traffic and radio resource management, multicast and broadcast services, device-to-device (D2D) and machine-type communications (M2M/MTC). Dr. Araniti is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting and of IEEE Access Journal, is Vice-Chair of the IEEE BTS Italian Chapter and of the Special Interest Group on Social Behaviour Driven Cognitive Radio Networks — IEEE Comsoc. Since 2003 he is involved in several teaching activities, mainly at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, where he is currently teaching Wireless Systems Planning and Radio Mobile Networks.