IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference
10–13 April 2022 // Austin, TX, USA
Boosting Verticals into Wireless Orbit

Program

Workshop Program IEEE WCNC 2022 (10 April 2020)

Title

IEEE WCNC 2022 WORKSHOP ON OPEN RAN ARCHITECTURE FOR 5G EVOLUTION AND 6G

 

Organizers:

  • Shahzada Rasool, Nokia Standards, USA (shahzada.rasool@nokia.com)
  • Javed Khan, Rakuten Symphony, USA (javed.khan@rakuten.com)
  • Ian Wong, VIAVI Solutions, USA (Ian.Wong@viavisolutions.com)

 

Planned organization of the workshop (Virtual and in-person, half-day):

Workshop Schedule 10 April 2020 (Sunday)

1

Welcome and Introduction

14:00

2

Keynote #1 – Dave Wolter, AVP, AT&T Labs

14:05

3

Keynote #2 – Harri Holma, Technology Advisor, Nokia Bell Labs

14:35

4

Technical session I (Paper 1 –2)

15:05

5

Networking Break

15:35

6

Technical session II (Paper 3)

16:00

7

Keynote #3 – Dr. Sameh Yamany, CTO, VIAVI Solutions

16:15

8

Panel discussion

16:45

 

 

Keynotes:

Keynote #1: Dave Wolter, Assistant Vice President – Radio Technology and Architecture, AT&T Labs.

Title of talk:  "An Operator’s Perspective on O-RAN for 5G Evolution and 6G".

 Dave is responsible for the identification, assessment, development and evolution of advanced radio technologies and architecture for AT&T’s fixed, unlicensed, and mobile wireless networks.  Dave’s team also provides technical support to the regulatory and corporate development teams for analysis of spectrum issues and opportunities including FCC rule development, interference and co-existence analysis, utilization strategy and auction preparation.  Focused on the 1-5 year time frame, Dave’s team conducts analysis, simulation, prototyping and proof of concept testing to help set technology direction and drive standards in 3GPP and O-RAN.

Dave joined what was then Southwestern Bell Technology Resources in 1991 from McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company.  Dave has been involved with every generation of cellular technology since AMPS, and has provided data, analysis and expertise to plan and implement AT&T’s mobile networks.  Dave’s team conducted seminal work in 5G conducting some of the world’s first 5G mmWave testbeds and trial networks, leading up to AT&T being the first company to deploy a standardized 5G mobile network in the US.  Dave’s team developed key patents for 5G NR and continues to make important contributions to 5G technology and AT&T’s patent portfolio.  A further area of focus is system co-existence and spectrum sharing techniques.  He has also worked extensively with Wi-Fi technology, developing and introducing both AT&T’s public Wi-Fi business as well as the in-home Wi-Fi distribution of video for U-verse. 

Dave holds an M.S. Electrical Engineering degree from Washington University in St. Louis.  He has 60 patents and has twice been awarded the AT&T Science and Technology Medal. 

 

Keynote #2: Harri Holma, Fellow, Nokia Technology Office.

Title of talk: "5G learnings from the field and evolution to 5G-Advanced"

Harri Holma joined Nokia Research Center in 1994 and received his M.Sc. from Helsinki University of Technology 1995. He has been with Nokia since 1994 and has been located both in Finland and in USA during that time. Harri Holma is currently working as Fellow and Advisor in Technology Office in Nokia with special interest on radio technologies and mobile networks. He has completed his PhD at Helsinki University of Technology 2003. Dr. Holma has edited the books "WCDMA for UMTS", "HSDPA/HSUPA for UMTS", "LTE for UMTS", “Voice over LTE”, “LTE Advanced”, “HSPA+ Evolution”, “LTE Small Cell Optimization” and “5G Technology”, and contributed to a number of other books in the radio communication area. https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2015/12/15/nokias-new-fellows-exceptional-people-remarkable-research/ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harri-holma-b436202/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarriHolma

Keynote #3: Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology Officer, Viavi Solutions.

Title of talk: "The maturing of 5G networks and the state of O-RAN"

Dr. Sameh Yamany is the Chief Technology Officer of VIAVI where he drives technology innovation and execution. Prior to joining VIAVI he was is the CEO and President of Trendium, where he led innovations in service assurance and analytics. Dr. Yamany's industry experience also includes his senior executive role at Tektronix Communications where he set the vision and development of the market leading wireless and wireline monitoring and troubleshooting suite of applications. Dr. Yamany worked as an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia and has a PhD in computer science from University of Louisville. He has authored several patents, and numerous journals, conference publications, and book chapters in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and systems engineering

 

Technical Session I:

  • Paper 1:  Joint Load balancing and Spatial-temporal Prediction Optimization for Ultra-Dense Network: Miaona Huang, Dongguan University of Technology, China; Jun Chen        Huawei Technolgies Ltd., Co., China; Xiaodong Xu, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications & Wireless Technology Innovation Institute, China;  Shujun Han Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China.
  • Paper 2: A Multi-Agent Dueling DQN based Route Selection Scheme for IAB Congestion Controlling; Kun Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China,

 

Technical Session II:

  • Paper 3: OpenRAN Gym: An Open Toolbox for Data Collection and Experimentation with AI in O-RAN; Leonardo Bonati, Michele Polese, Salvatore D'Oro, Stefano Basagni, Tommaso Melodia (Northeastern University, USA).                                                

                                                                                 

Panel Discussion:

Moderators: Dr. Ian Wong, Dr. Shahzada Rasool

Panel discussion topic: Open RAN state of the union and looking ahead to 5GAdv and 6G

 

Panelists:

  • Prof. Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Distinguished Professor and Director of WINLAB, Rutgers.
  • Amitava Ghosh, Nokia Fellow, Nokia Standards and Technology.
  • Sridhar Rajagopal, VP and Fellow Mavenir.
  • Mike Garyantes, Director of Technical Standards, Qualcomm.
  • Murali Ranganathan, Ecosystem development lead, Meta Connectivity.
  • Azita Arvani, GM, Rakuten Symphony Americas.
  • Shankar Venkatraman,  Fellow, Emerging RAN Technologies, Verizon.

 

 Dipankar Raychaudhuri is Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Director, WINLAB (Wireless Information Network Lab) at Rutgers University. As WINLAB's Director, he is responsible for an internationally recognized industry-university research center specializing in wireless technology. He has served as Principal Investigator for several large multi-institutional U.S. National Science Foundation grants including the "ORBIT" wireless testbed and the “MobilityFirst” future Internet architecture (FIA) project, and is currently leading the “COSMOS” project under the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.

Dr. Raychaudhuri has previously held corporate R&D positions including: Chief Scientist, Iospan Wireless (2000-01), Assistant General Manager & Department Head, NEC Laboratories (1993-99) and Head, Broadband Communications, Sarnoff Corp (1990-92).  He obtained the B.Tech (Hons) from IIT Kharagpur in 1976 and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1978, 79. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of several professional awards including the Rutgers School of Engineering Faculty of the Year Award (2017), IEEE Donald J. Fink Award (2014),  Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur, Distinguished Alumni Award (2012), and the Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation (2008).

 Amitabha (Amitava) Ghosh (F’15) is a Nokia Fellow and works at Nokia Standards and Strategy. He joined Motorola in 1990 after receiving his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.  Since joining Motorola he worked on multiple wireless technologies starting from IS-95, cdma-2000, 1xEV-DV/1XTREME, 1xEV-DO, UMTS, HSPA, 802.16e/WiMAX and 3GPP LTE. He has 60  issued patents, has written multiple book chapters and has authored numerous external and internal technical papers. He is currently working on 5G Evolution and 6G technologies. Recently, he was elected chair of the NextGA (an US 6G initiative) National Roadmap Working Group. His research interests are in the area of digital communications, signal processing and wireless communications. He is the recipient of 2016 IEEE Stephen O. Rice and 2017 Neal Shephard prize, member of IEEE Access editorial board and co-author of the books titled “Essentials of LTE and LTE-A” and “5G Enabled Industrial IoT Network”.

Sridhar Rajagopal is currently a SVP & Sr. Fellow, Technology & Strategy at Mavenir Systems, where he leads customer engineering and radio integration for Mavenir's Open RAN products. Prior to this, he was one of the initial employees at Ranzure Networks, a cloud RAN start-up. He also had R&D roles in design, prototyping and standardization of 5G cellular and Wi-Fi systems at Samsung, in UWB technology at WiQuest communications and 3G/4G research at Nokia. He was an associate editor for the Journal of Signal Processing Systems (Springer) and has led leadership positions in standardization bodies such as IEEE and WiMedia.  He was a co-recipient of the IEEE 2017 Marconi Prize Paper award for his research on mmWave systems. He has co-invented around 50 issued US patents. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University and is a senior member of IEEE.

 Michael Garyantes is a Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm, focusing on O-RAN Alliance work especially in the Open Fronthaul Working Group (WG4).  Michael participated in O-RAN’s predecessor, xRAN and was very active in writing the Open Fronthaul Control, User, and Synchronization Plane Specification xRAN standard which became the equivalent O-RAN document, now at version 08.00.  Michael also acted as O-RAN WG4 co-chair for two years.

Michael brings extensive base station architecture and system engineering experience to his work within O-RAN, having designed base station systems at Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia over a 25-year interval, supporting the CDMA, EV-DO, W-CDMA and LTE air interface standards.  He has focused on the design of flexible base station systems which has made for a natural shift to RAN open-architecture standardization work.  Michael has a BSCSE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MSEE from the University of Southern California.

 Murali Ranganathan is currently an Ecosystem development lead at Meta Connectivity leading the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) OpenRAN RAN Intelligence and Automation (RIA) workgroup. The OpenRAN RIA team focusses on building an ecosystem of vendors and mobile network operators to promote intelligent optimization of dis-aggregated Radio Access Networks (RAN) using advanced AI/ML solutions. Before joining Facebook, Murali was the Head of business product management at Nokia where he provided strategic direction for growing Nokia’s Self-Organizing Networks (SON) business. Murali has ten awarded patents and publications in addition to numerous engineering awards. In his spare time, Murali enjoys interval-running and traveling to new destinations.

 Azita Arvani is the General Manager (Americas), Head of Global Government Affairs and Industry Relations at Rakuten Symphony. Arvani works with telco operators, governments and enterprises with the vision to connect everyone and everything to fulfill their potential for a sustainable future.

Deploying the latest digital technologies including 5G, AI, IoT, cloud, and AR/VR, Arvani has created new businesses, developed products, and built partnerships for both established Fortune 500 companies as well as rapid-growth startups. Prior to Rakuten, Arvani served as Head of Innovation Partnering & Venture Management at Nokia. Arvani has also held senior leadership and advisory roles at Docomo, Xerox, and Upek (now part of Apple), among others. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Open RAN Policy Coalition on behalf of Rakuten Mobile. Arvani holds a Master of Science in Management from Stanford University (Sloan Fellow), a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Science in Math/Computer Science (Magna Cum Laude) from University of California, Los Angeles. She is recognized as an avid evangelist of true digital transformation for telcos as well as other industries.

 

Shankar is the lead technical architect behind Verizon’s vRAN. He has over 15 years of experience designing and deploying wireless technologies. At Verizon, he leads architecture efforts working with the ecosystem and standards bodies to build an Open and Virtualized Radio Access network. Shankar also led the development of Open Fronthaul from inception in xRAN and co-chairs O-RAN fronthaul working group.

 

The Workshop Organizers:

  • Shahzada Rasool (Nokia Standards)
  • Javed Khan (Rakuten Symphony)
  • Ian Wong (VIAVI Solutions

 Shahzada Rasool (shahzada.rasool@nokia.com) is a Sr. Research Specialist with Nokia Standards – Radio Interface Group in Naperville, Illinois where he is part of Nokia O-RAN WG4 delegation and acts as O-RAN Fronthaul spec editor.  Shahzada is experienced with both Open RAN architecture and fronthaul design and has held various positions in wireless industry since 2011.  Prior to Nokia, Shahzada was with Sprint where he was leading the Sprint RAN technology roadmap. He has more than 20 issued patents and has published 15 journal and conference papers with over 250 citations.  He has a PhD is electrical engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

 Javed Khan (javed.khan@rakuten.com) is a Sr. Director of 5G RAN Product Management with Rakuten Symphony, where he leads their Private Networks and Small Cells portfolio. Prior to joining Rakuten Symphony in late 2020, Javed worked at Nokia since 2011 as a Member of Technical Staff in 4G Systems Engineering in Mobile Networks and later as a 5G RAN Product Manager in the North America CTO Office leading technology roadmaps with Tier 1 operators in North America. Prior to Nokia, Javed worked at Motorola as a software architect and systems engineering lead on various products in technologies spanning LTE and CDMA. He has a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, IA.

 Dr. Ian Wong (ian.wong@viavisolutions.com) is Director of RF and Wireless Architecture at VIAVI.  He serves on the O-RAN Alliance as co-chair of the Test and Integration Focus Group (TIFG), editor of the end-to-end test specification and contributor to the conformance and interoperability test specifications for open fronthaul.

Previously, Dr. Wong led development of real-time end-to-end 5G wireless test and prototyping systems and managed 3GPP wireless standards and IP strategy at NI (National Instruments).  He is a senior member of the IEEE and co-authored Resource Allocation for Multiuser Multicarrier Wireless Systems.

 

 

 

 

 

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