Tuesday, 9th of June, 2009
Start
Around 120 people in the auditorium.
9:00 John Hosking, prof. CS, openning.
9:15 Frank Mount, general intro into innovation in NZ, Alcatel and Telecom.
9:30 Rod Alferness, Chief Scientist, introduction to Bell Labs
Bell Labs: Alcatel-Lucent’s Research Organisation
26k patents worldwide
Rod was stressing that the research efforts are not geared towards incremental improvements but rather towards looking for disruptive communication technologies, that will substantially change the way communication systems operate. Whether it is driven by the needs of the market or the main driver for business advantage and/or prevention from competitive disruptions was not clear from the presentation.
Alcatel-Lucent Ventures: mechanism to incubate technological solutions to the point where they can be “transition to permanent home”.
Identified trends:
all packet networks
content growing exponentially
digital population expanding
energy regulations, and environmentally-friendly deployments
converged wireline-wireless nets
fast broadband at home, broadband on the move
how to leverage net storage
Identified challenges:
cost-effective and scalable solutions
business model for OTT apps (over-the-top)
Identified opportunities:
controlling electrical grids
sensor/control infrastructure nets and home automation
The tension between the infrastructure providers, with high up-front
costs and infrastructure costs, vs. the OTT service providers and Apps
providers. New business models are required, to transfer some of the
revenue down the stack to infrastructure providers. Stress on
Application enablers.
Example product: 9900 wireless network guardian traffic analysis +
network monitoring (stats over various protocols, bandwidth vs. air
time)
10:05 coffee break
10:20 Theodor (Tod) Sizer II, wireless vision.
Identified future trends and requirements:
increase coverage
more base stations
increased backhaul requriments
self-x networks
Receiver Ehancements: mmse receivers, interference cancellation Rx
Packet Scheduler with Cross-layer optimisation, adaptive MIMO RDMA for
LTE (increase of spectral efficiency)
Fact: Current hand-offs errors is around 3%.
Reduction of interference by connecting user to multiple base
stations, so that multiple base statetions are used for
communication. Requires really fast backhaul network.
Reliability, capacity, coverage, operational expenses (self-x networks)
Wirless networks will become more and more important.
11:10 Gerard Foschini (from Bell Labs),
About “wireless relay system: from very elementary arrangements to cellular
networks” Sfar and Raman (postdoc visitors)
Multi-relay signal propagation. Collaborative power addition (using
relays to strengthen the power capacity of the signal that travels to
the destination)
Ad-hoc networks.
11:55 Paul Teal, SMIEEE, Victoria University of Wellington
Introduction to people and research projects at Victoria
Assoc Prof Peter Smith – statistitian, random matrices
Philippa Martin – space-time signal coding
Prof. Hascha Sirisena – routing protocols
Mensoor Shafi – lots of areas
Pawel Dmochowski – timing, correcting timing errors
Other research: network-level and data-link layer, signal processing,
data coding,
12:07 Discussion session, lunch.
13:20 Iraj Saniee “Self-organising Networks” sample of research at bell labs
Network management is mostly ad-hoc. OPEX is at least 75% of total expenses, $100B worldwide, and it is increasing. It impacts Telecommunication service providers not only in OPEX but also because networks are not optimized for capacity/performance.
OPEX cost breakdown:
sales/marketing: 43%
network operation: 20%
customer care 7%
backhaul: 10%
setup costs: 20%
stability and optimisation – key elements.
Self-X networks:
– self-recovery
– self-initialization/discovery/configuration
– self-protection/security
– self-adaptation and learning: adaptin in dynamic environments
– self-stabilization/optimisation (negotiation of the use
of scarce resources)
Methodologies used:
– potential energy optimisaiton, through iterative process of function minimisation, eg: through Gibb’s sampler and simulated annealing.
– stigmergy, social insects self-organising, and physiology based approaches
– general equilibria in economics(pareto-, nash- equilibria)
– computer science and network theory, eg. advesarial soultions, price of Anarchy (braess’ paradocx) in network theory from 1960s. Lyapunov functions and primal-dual methods from math prgramming.
Example research themes:
– general theory of greedy primal-dual for self-x
– self-stabilizing protocol stack for mobile ad hoc wireless mesh networks (existing mobile ad-hoc network research exsited for the last 20 years). The goal was to redesign it from scratch.
– self-organised frequency power assignment in wireless femto cellular networks, 100,000 – 1,000,000 femto cells in dense metro areas – not possible to manage it centrally. There are no current plans for
direct communication between AP due to privacy issues, etc.
– self-organised content distribution – a simple scheme based on storing the most frequently items in the cache turns out to be the most efficient, worse from the global optima by a constant factor.
14:10 Ilze Ziedins “Self management, optimization and networks”, University of Auckland
– network measurement and visualisation traffic patterns, network topology, bottlenecks? Real time detection of network changes. WAND gorup at Waikato and their DAG card (Tony McGregor, Murray Pearson, Richard Nelson). Nevil Brownlee at Auckland. Traces of traffic from Waikato and Auckland publicaly available.
– user equilibria vs. system optima. System can settle into equilibrium which is far from optimal.
Braess’s paradox, Downs-Thomson paradox, etc – queueing models, queueing analysis
– cognitive radio
– network design
SAN, and fibre optics networks, Mike O’Sullivan, Cameron Walker, etc.
14:30 discussion
Iraj Saniee said: “Handsets should not be treated as automous devices or autonomous
agents”.
14:40 coffee break
15:15 Bruno Aidan, “Post Web2.0 Communication Apps”
examples of:
device + app + web service, eg.
iphone + app + web services
smart home + app + web services
allomatch.com
communication-mashups.com
Bell labs TV
16:00 Martin Purvis “NGNs and GNI projects at Otago”
Martin talked about GNI project and ONGENS lab. General introduction to Otago IMS Testbed. Overview of current and future research direction. Lots of interest and questions.
16:30 Discussion
Rather large interest in NGNs and application space.
The symposium continued, Day 2.
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