Welcome to IEEE DySpan 2012

Keynote Talk Abstracts

Vanu Bose (Vanu, Inc.): Making Dynamic Spectrum Access a Commercial Reality (slides)
Despite several decades of advancement in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technologies and recent regulatory movement towards allowing spectrum sharing, DSA has not yet become a mainstream commercial technology. This talk will review the remaining technical, political and regulatory barriers and identify several missing links in the commercializatoon process, in particular the identification of some quantitative experiments that would help the relevant stakeholders overcome their concerns about dynamic spectrum sharing.

Mark Gorenberg (Hummer Winblad Venture Partners): Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth (slides)
The report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) responds to the policy challenges and technological opportunities that have arisen in the past two years since President Obama issued his Memorandum requiring that the Federal Government make available 500 MHz of Federal or non-federal spectrum for both mobile and fixed wireless broadband use by commercial users within 10 years. The report concludes that the traditional practice of clearing government-held spectrum of Federal users and auctioning it for commercial use is not sustainable. In light of changes made possible by modern technology, it recommends that U.S. policy emphasize sharing of underutilized spectrum to the maximum extent consistent with the Federal mission and that 1,000 megahertz of additional Federal spectrum be identified in which to implement shared-use spectrum pilot projects. The PCAST report, which was informed by the deliberations of PCAST members and prominent spectrum experts from the public and private sectors, identifies actions that should be taken to implement a new “dynamic sharing” model that makes spectrum sharing by Federal users the norm, and also allows sharing with multiple users, under a wide range of conditions, without infringing on each other’s services. The report is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreports. I will present the most important components of this report.

Charles R. Kalmanek (AT&T Research): Trends in Wireless Network Evolution (slides)
Wireless data traffic continues to grow rapidly, with the growth in the number of connected devices and device capabilities. This demand is driving significant wireless network investments, as well as architecture evolution such as small cells (which enable greater spectrum reuse), greater use of Wi-Fi (to offload wide area networks), and proposals such as spectrum sharing (as a means of making more spectrum available). This talk discusses some of the research and engineering challenges that need to be addressed to fully realize these new architectural concepts while meeting customer expectations for service quality.

Rajesh Pankaj (Qualcomm): The Path to 1000X (slides)
As existing and emerging devices and use cases continue to drive mobile data consumption, mobile networks need to prepare for 1000X traffic growth. In this presentation, we will discuss the growth of wireless data demand and the key factors that need to be in place to meet the challenge of providing that data capacity to the end users in a cost effective manner. The key factors include small cells, wi-fi, broadcast, and additional spectrum. We will discuss the growth of cellular small cells and wi-fi and how they complement one another along with the macro network to meet this demand. In addition, we will also look at how broadcast capability helps offload some of this demand. Finally, we will also touch upon the need for additional spectrum to make the 1000x growth in capacity a reality.

Henri Tirri (Nokia): Data: The Frontier beyond Dynamic Spectrum (slides)
Cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access will redefine the enabling technology of wireless communication. In the same way that the Internet protocol suite transformed fixed line networking, they will provide an end-to-end connectivity that will not only expand the Net to mobile devices in a more efficient way, but will also establish mobile devices as “first class citizens” of the Net. The evolution of the fixed line global network infrastructure and its consumer and commercial usage was driven by the birth of the World Wide Web and the services it enables. One can argue that the same will now happen in the wireless domain and dynamic spectrum access with cognitive radio will become enablers for the new drivers of the global “Wireless Net”. In this talk we will take a look into some of these emerging drivers like contextual services by “connected” sensing and the broad data mining opportunities which Cognitive Radio may generate.

Speakers and Plenaries

Vanu Bose is CEO of Vanu, Inc., a provider of innovative wireless infrastructure solutions. Vanu, Inc. pioneered the commercialization of software-defined radio and became the first company to receive FCC certification of a software-defined radio in 2004. The company has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Software-Defined Radio Forum Achievement Award, IEEE Spectrum Magazine’s Wireless Winner, and the GSM Association Technology Award for Most Innovative Infrastructure Product. Dr. Bose has been granted the personal distinctions of being named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and a ComputerWorld Honors Program Laureate. Dr. Bose is currently serving as a Commissioner to the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development, as a member of the Army Science Board, the Board of Trustees for the Boston Museum of Science, and as a member of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program Industry Advisory Board. Dr. Bose was a technical expert for the President’s Council of Advisors (PCAST) report: “Realizing the full potential of government-held spectrum to spur economic growth”. Dr. Bose received his B.S, M.S. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Mark Gorenberg is a Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. In 2011, Mark was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a 21-person advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers (www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/pcast). Mark is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation, a member of the Steering Committee of Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, the Leadership Board of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Technology Advisory Committee of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Board of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. In 2012, Mark also became a Director of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Mark received a B.S.E.E. from MIT, an M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota, and an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University.

Charles R. Kalmanek is Vice President-Research, AT&T Services, Inc. He is responsible for research in AT&T on algorithms, communications technologies, large-scale networks, speech and language understanding, machine learning, multimedia technologies, human-computer interfaces, mobile applications, converged services, and software and information systems. Chuck joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1980. He has extensive experience in network architecture, protocols and distributed systems. Chuck received a B.S. degree from Cornell University in Applied and Engineering Physics and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Columbia University and New York University, respectively. He is a recipient of AT&T’s Strategic Patent and Strategic Standards awards. Chuck is an IEEE Fellow, and co-edited Guide to Reliable Internet Services and Applications, published by Springer in 2010.

Rajesh Pankaj is Senior Vice President, Engineering at Qualcomm Research where he is responsible for a broad portfolio of R&D projects with particular interest in the next generation wireless WAN systems. He joined QUALCOMM in 1997 as a systems engineer for the high speed wireless data system that led to 1xEVDO. Prior to joining QUALCOMM, Rajesh was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto where he conducted research on networks, focusing on all-optical networks and ATM networks. Rajesh holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and an SM and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Henry Tirri is Nokia’s chief technology officer and an executive vice president, responsible for setting Nokia’s technology agenda both now and in the future and driving core innovation to enable business development opportunities. Henry began his Nokia career as a Research Fellow and was leading Nokia Research Centre (NRC) Systems Research laboratory before being appointed Head of NRC. Before joining Nokia, Henry was a Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Graduate School and the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Helsinki, from 1998-2004. Previous positions also include working as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, Research Scientist at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Visiting Scientist at NASA AMES. He is the author and co-author of more than 175 academic papers in various fields of computer science, social sciences and statistics and holds five patents. He is also the co-founder of Ekahau, a recognized leader in location-enabling enterprise Wi-Fi networks. He holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Helsinki.