Abstract: This talk will present an overview of our work on laying the basic design principles for new approaches to programmable and virtualized next-generation wireless networks. We will cover three four research thrusts, namely architectures, programmability, slicing, and experimental testbeds. First, we will introduce the building principles of end-to-end fully virtualized cellular wireless networks, and discuss architectural alternatives and options. We will also discuss the main recent developments within the leading open-source alliances. Then, we will talk about programmability, or how to develop abstractions and algorithms to automatically control resources in an end-to-end environment. In this context, we will discuss our prior work on developing CellOS, a new Cellular Operating System. The third part of the talk will focus on the role of network slicing, and on recently developed algorithmic and architectural frameworks to provide optimally sized, isolated slices on virtualized infrastructures with differentiated SLAs in terms of performance and security. Last, we will discuss the state of the art of the experimental testing ecosystem for 5G and beyond, focusing on advances in the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research Program, and discuss the role of open testing platforms in advancing the wireless ecosystem.
Bio: Tommaso Melodia is the William Lincoln Smith Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things and the Director of Research for the PAWR Project Office. He received his Laurea (integrated BS and MS) from the University of Rome - La Sapienza and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award. Prof. Melodia is serving as Editor in Chief for Computer Networks, and has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, among others. He was the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Infocom 2018, and General Chair for ACM MobiHoc 2020, IEEE SECON 2019, ACM Nanocom 2019, and ACM WUWNet 2014. Prof. Melodia’s research on modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of Internet-of-Things and wireless networked systems has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, several industrial partners, the Air Force Research Laboratory the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, and the Army Research Laboratory.

Abstract: Deciding the make-up of mobile networking systems have traditionally been the purview of a fairly closed ecosystem led by equipment vendors and operators, and deployed systems till date are largely a composition of proprietary blackbox appliances. But as we head to 5G, mobile networks are undergoing a transformation driven my several factors. In this talk, I'll give my perspective on what is causing this transformation and highlight our key research contributions synergistic to this trend, in particular our recent work focusing on the two important use cases of indoor and universal mobile access.
Bio: Mahesh Marina is a Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. Before joining Edinburgh, he had a two-year postdoctoral stint at the UCLA Computer Science Department. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2004 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has previously held visiting researcher positions at ETH Zurich and Ofcom London. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE. More information about him and his research can be found at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mmarina/.

Abstract: The relentless demand on bandwidth for wireless systems beyond 5G will continue as new applications continue to be developed. Increasingly, new spectrum will be allocated on a shared basis (e.g. CBRS, 6 GHz), either with federal users or other commercial systems. This talk will outline some of the challenges and opportunities posed by this new spectrum regime and how open architectures and test-beds can be employed to address these challenges.
Bio: Dr. Monisha Ghosh has been serving as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since Jan. 13, 2020. Prior to this, she was at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a rotating Program Director since September 2017, in the Computer and Network System (CNS) division within the Directorate of Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) where she managed wireless networking research within the Networking Technologies and Systems (NeTS) program. Dr. Ghosh is also a Research Professor at the University of Chicago where she conducts research on wireless technologies for the IoT, 5G cellular, next generation Wi-Fi systems and spectrum coexistence. Prior to joining the University of Chicago in September 2015, she worked at Interdigital, Philips Research and Bell Laboratories, on various wireless systems such as the HDTV broadcast standard, cable standardization and on cognitive radio for the TV White Spaces. She has been an active contributor to many industry standards and was recognized with a Certificate of Appreciation for her outstanding contributions to IEEE 802.22. She is a Fellow of the IEEE. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1991, and her B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (India) in 1986.

Abstract: Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is a collaborative community accelerating and transforming the way telecom infrastructure is created, taken to market, and deployed. TIP focuses on developing solutions across all areas of the technology stack, including access, transport, core and services and on implementing open and interoperable product solutions for commercially-driven use cases. This talk will provide an overview of various TIP Project Groups and Community Labs, followed by a more detailed introduction to the Open Core Network Project Group that is focused on developing an open, cloud-native, and converged core supporting 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi access technologies.
Bio: Tassos Michail is a Connectivity Technologies and Ecosystem Manager at Facebook where he leads a number of connectivity programs in the Telecom Infra Project. He currently co-chairs the Open Core Network project group and has previously contributed to TIP’s projects in virtualized RAN, edge computing and network slicing. He has 20 years of experience designing and bringing to market wireless systems. Prior to Facebook, he held product management and systems engineering roles at Brocade, SpiderCloud Wireless and Aperto Networks. Tassos holds a PhD and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Abstract: State of global internet connectivity is at 51% with 42% of that is coverage gap leaving only 9% of coverage gap (according to GSMA Intelligence 2019). It begs a basic question: how is it possible that after three decades of the Internet, 42% of the covered population remain unconnected. At Facebook Connectivity, our mission is to bring those people online to a faster Internet. We work on a wide range of technologies spanning from undersea cable and dark fiber to space and satellite communications. Terrestrial radio and wireless technologies play a strong role in our fundamental R&D and conceptualization of often ground-breaking technologies, such as OpenRAN or OpenCore. In many cases, our teams work on development and productization of those technologies. In other cases, we work with our ecosystem partners, solution developers and service providers to commercialize and eventually deploy those developed products with mobile operators, service providers and virtual mobile operators. Magma, Terragraph and Carrier Wi-Fi are examples of our successful wireless endeavors that have greatly impacted the industry from core network, mmWave or Wi-Fi for mobile operators perspectives. Most parts of these technologies are software-defined and are open and disaggregated. This talk will focus on outlining the salient features and benefits of Magma during this talk with a glimpse on the history of Magma to set the stage for what challenges we faced so far for Magma as a software-defined stack for wireless networks. I would also like to outline our technology and product roadmap on how the Magma ecosystem may look like over the next 3-5 years along with the associated opportunities that we see in software-defined open wireless networks.
Bio: Shah is the Engineering Lead at Facebook Connectivity, where he manages the Connectivity Infrastructure Software team to bring more people online by enabling operators and service providers with open, flexible and extensible carrier-grade infrastructure technologies, spanning a wide range of technologies: RAN, Wi-Fi, backhaul, edge, core and cloud systems. His team supports Magma - a distributed, converged stack that was open sourced in 2019 and Terragraph - a mmWave radio technologies for fixed wireless and mobile backhaul links. Prior to Facebook, Shah was an Engineering Director at Ericsson and led the NFV platform team for EPC gateways (vEPG, vBNG, vWMG and vSecGW). Previously, he managed teams at Redback Networks as well as Cisco Systems spanning a leadership and engineering career over 19 years. He has authored 18 patents and has another 7 pending at USPTO. Shah holds a masters from Stanford University and a bachelors from University of Queensland, Australia — both in Electrical Engineering.

Abstract: 5G is around the corner. In addition to enhancing mobile broadband service, 5G aims to be the connectivity solution for massive IoT, and ultra-reliable, low latency communications. Augmenting the 5G evolution, the ways of utilizing the mobile spectrum, the most critical and expensive resource in realizing mobile networks is also going though a transformation, one that is democratizing mobile networking. These developments are opening the door for enterprises, organizations, universities, etc, to deploy and operationalize their own private networks as an enabler for Industry 4.0. For enterprises. the preferred way of consuming private 5G is as a managed cloud-service. To this end, in this talk we will introduce Aether, ONF’s Enterprise-5G/LTE-Edge-Cloud-as-a-Service. Aether enables two distinct managed services to enterprises: 5G/LTE-Connectivity-as-a-Service and Edge-Cloud-Managementl-as-a-Service. Aether has been operational across multiple sites around the globe as a Pilot Network since December 2019. In this talk, we will introduce the architectural pillars for Aether, provide an overview of its components, demonstrate its operation, and provide examples of enterprise-centric edge cloud applications that currently run on Aether. We will conclude the talk with a summary of on-going work and Aether’s roadmap.
Bio: Oguz is currently the Vice President of Research & Development at ONF where he leads all mobile related projects. Prior, he served as the Chief Architect for Mobile Networking at ONF. Before joining ONF, Oguz was the CTO at Argela-USA where he was the innovator of a Programmable Radio Access Network Architecture (ProgRAN) for 5G that enabled the world's first dynamically programmable RAN slicing solution. He has also held prior industry positions at Nokia Research Center and Bell Laboratories. Oguz was also a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Istanbul, Turkey for a number of years. He holds many US and European patents on various aspects of 3G, 4G and 5G, and has authored numerous journal and conference publications. He has recently co-authored the book "5G Mobile Networks: A Systems Approach”, with Larry Peterson.