Keynote Speakers

Networked minidrones: The hype is ripe
Time: 09:30 – 10:30 on Thursday, May 18th
Venue: Dülfer-Saal Mensa
Presentation slides (URL)

Abstract: This keynote by Christian Bettstetter discusses the emerging technology of networked small drones operating in an autonomous fashion. He will review applications with focus on disaster management and aerial monitoring, give an overview of engineering challenges in the design and operation of such systems, and highlight open research issues for wireless networking and distributed coordination in this context. A multidrone system developed at Lakeside Labs will be presented and explained.

For further information, please visit Prof. Bettstetter’s webpage.

Ultra-Reliable Wireless Communications: Building Blocks and Models
Time: 09:00 – 10:00 on Wednesday, May 17th
Venue: Dülfer-Saal Mensa
Presentation slides (PDF)

Abstract: One of the most innovative features brought by the 5G wireless systems is Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), used for mission critical communications, such as reliable remote action with robots or coordination among vehicles. Once a system or service designer can safely assume that wireless connectivity is “truly anywhere and anytime” and can be guaranteed e.g. >99.99% of the time, the approach to system design and operation changes fundamentally. This talk will present five building blocks for achieving ultra-reliable communications: wireless channel models, packetization, protocols, extreme diversity, and spectrum usage. The wireless channel models that are widely used today have been derived for scenarios that can capture events whose probability is in the range 0.01 to 0.0001. However, this is not sufficient for URLLC and the talk will present the features and challenges in extrapolating the models towards very rare events, relevant for URLLC. Packetization encompasses the tradeoffs in encoding of control information and data, which is tightly related to the discussion on protocol features for URLLC. Furthermore, very high reliability can only be achieved by extreme diversity in terms of frequency, antennas or deployed infrastructure, which will also be addressed in the talk. Finally, the talk will present how the features of URLLC dictate the ways in which it can spectrally coexist with the other two modes in 5G, extended Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC).

For further information, please visit Prof. Popovski’s webpage.

Using Multipath TCP to enable smooth connectivity in 5G networks
Time: 09:00 – 10:00 on Friday, May 19th
Venue: Dülfer-Saal Mensa
Presentation slides (PDF)

Abstract: Multi-access is the future of mobile connectivity: 5G networks promise a blend of Wifi and cellular connectivity to dramatically increase throughput in urban areas while ensuring great mobility experience and wide coverage. This means that mobiles will have to dynamically switch betweeing using Wifi, cellular or both depending on their location, the radio characteristics and the load in the respective networks. We argue that the traditional mantra of connecting to a single network at a time, be it Wifi or cellular, is at odds with the above goals. Instead, mobile devices should simultaneously be connected to both Wifi and cellular networks, possibly to multiple access points/cells in each network, and dynamically load balance traffic across all of these using the newly standardized Multipath TCP protocol. The talk will cover our experience in applying these ideas to Wifi (NSDI 2015) and present open questions that must be addressed to enable this vision come true for 5G networks.

Short bio: Costin Raiciu received a PhD from University College London in 2011 under the supervision of Mark Handley and David Rosenbaum. Since then he moved to University Politehnica of Bucharest (PUB) where he is Associate Professor. Costin’s past work has largely focused on developing the Multipath TCP protocol and congestion control, as well as standardising it. Presently, he leads a research group in Bucharest that has been focusing on two main research directions:
– understanding the effects the ongoing Multipath TCP deployment (in Apple phones) will have on the rest of the Internet, if Multipath TCP is widely adopted. See two papers in NSDI 2015 on this topic.
– making sense of middlebox processing. We have been developing SymNet (Sigcomm 2016), a symbolic execution tool for networks, and have shown how it can be used to allow Internet innovation (Eurosys 2015).

For further information, please visit Prof. Raiciu’s webpage.

Haptic communication for the Tactile Internet
Time: 17:00 – 18:00 on Wednesday, May 17th
Venue: Dülfer-Saal Mensa
Presentation slides (PDF)

Abstract: Audiovisual communications is at the core of multimedia systems that allow users to interact across distances. It is common understanding that both audio and video are required for high-quality interaction. While audiovisual information provides a user with a satisfactory impression of being present in a remote environment, physical interaction and manipulation are not supported. This, however, will be an important aspect of the emerging Tactile Internet. True immersion into a distant environment and efficient distributed collaboration require the ability to physically interact with remote objects and to literally get in touch with the remote side. Touching and manipulating objects remotely becomes possible if we augment traditional audiovisual communications by the haptic modality. Haptic communications is a relatively young field of research that has the potential to substantially improve human-human and human-machine interaction. In this talk I will discuss selected aspects concerning the acquisition, coding, transmission, display and perception of haptic information. I will also briefly describe the scope of the recently started IEEE standardization activity on “Haptic Codecs for the Tactile Internet” (IEEE P1918.1.1).

For further information, please visit Prof. Steinbach’s webpage.

“Subspace Sudoku” for Multiuser mmWave Communications
Time: 17:15 – 18:15 on Thursday, May 18th
Venue: Dülfer-Saal Mensa
Presentation slides (PDF)

Abstract: mmWave communications plays an important role for future cellular networks (5G and beyond) because of the vast amount of spectrum available in the underutilized mmWave frequency bands. To overcome the huge free space omnidirectional path loss in those frequency bands, the deployment of a very large number of antennas at the base station (BS), known as massive MIMO, is crucial. The related complexity, power consumption and costs resulting from the large number of antennas can be reduced by limiting the number of RF chains. This for instance leads to hybrid precoding, which, in contrast to the traditional fully digital precoding and combining, moves a part of the signal processing from the digital to the analog domain. In addition, the large number of antennas at the BS enables multiuser communications with several mobile stations (MSs) by spatial multiplexing. Taking into account another particular feature of mmWave communications, namely the specular characteristic of propagation channels, novel signal processing methods for the operation of mmWave scenarios have been proposed based on the sparsity of the transmission channels.

In contrast to previous work, we present a purely geometrically based subspace approach for the design of nearly optimal spatial multiplexing solutions. The new approach stems from the previous proposed Linear Successive Allocation (LISA) method developed for the traditional fully digital precoding and combining. It successively allocates data streams to the MSs and suppresses the inter-stream interference in two steps, which perfectly matches the hybrid architecture. This talk gives an introduction into the methodology of LISA, an information theoretic justification, its near optimal performance in multiuser mmWave communication scenarios, and why it may remind the audience to “Sudoku in subspaces”.

Short bio: Wolfgang Utschick completed several accredited industrial training programs before he received the diploma and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering, both with honors, from Technische Universität München. Since 2002 Dr. Utschick is Professor at TUM where he is chairing a Signal Processing group (Professur für Methoden der Signalverarbeitung). He teaches courses on Signal Processing, Stochastic Processes, and Optimization Theory in the field of Wireless Communications, Signal Processing Applications and Power Transmission Systems. Since 2011 he is serving as a regular guest professor at Singapore’s new autonomous university, Singapore Institute of Technology. He holds several patents in the field of multi-antenna signal processing and has authored and co-authored many (> 300) technical articles in international journals and conference proceedings. He edited several books and is founder and editor of the Springer book series Foundations in Signal Processing, Communications and Networking. Dr. Utschick has been principal investigator in multiple research projects funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, for which he recently served as an initiator and spokesman of the focus program Communications over Interference limited Networks (SPP COIN). He is a member of the VDE, senior member of the IEEE, and currently Chair of the German Signal Processing Section. Dr. Utschick also serves as a Dean for the Department for Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technische Universität München.

For further information, please visit Prof. Utschick’s webpage.