Abstract

Open RAN (O-RAN) is a rapidly developing paradigm for the roll-out of wireless networks, already in use for 5G systems and expected to play an important role in 6G. It involves disaggregation and virtualisation of network functions over three main network components: the open Radio Unit (O-RU), Distributed Unit (O-DU) and Centralized Unit (O-CU). Distributed MIMO (D-MIMO), also known as cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) is a technology – highly compatible with O-RAN – which allows user terminals to be served via multiple access points which are provided by multiple O-RUs. Vehicular communications, especially for autonomous vehicles and other safety-critical applications, is a particularly challenging application for wireless communications, since it requires extremely high reliability under very high mobility conditions, and must also be highly resilient to unexpected changes in the radio environment. The talk will explore how D-MIMO implemented over an O-RAN network can help fulfil these requirements, and what type of network architecture may be most appropriate for this purpose. In particular it will explore how the network functions, especially physical layer functions, might be distributed between these components in this application.

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Alister Burr was born in London, U.K, in 1957. He received the BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton, U.K in 1979 and the PhD from the University of Bristol in 1984. Between 1975 and 1985 he worked at Thorn-EMI Central Research Laboratories in London. In 1985 he joined the Department of Electronics (now part of the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology) at the University of York, U.K, where he has been Professor of Communications since 2000. His research interests are in wireless communication systems, including MIMO and cell-free massive MIMO, Open RAN, physical layer network coding, and iterative detection and decoding techniques. He currently leads the £9.5M project YO-RAN, funded by UK Government. He has published more than 300 papers in refereed international conferences and journals, and is the author of “Modulation and Coding for Wireless Communications” (published by Prentice-Hall/PHEI), and co-author of “Wireless Physical-Layer Network Coding (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In 1999 he was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the U.K. Royal Society, and in 2002 he received the J. Langham Thompson Premium from the Institution of Electrical Engineers. He has also given more than 20 invited presentations, including six keynote presentations. He has been co-chair, working group 2, of a series of European COST programmes including currently CA20120 INTERACT, and has also served as Associate Editor for IEEE Communications Letters, Workshops Chair for IEEE ICC 2016, and TPC co-chair for PIMRC 2018 and 2020.

Abstract

With the emergence of autonomous and electric vehicles, vehicular communications are gaining an important momentum as their fundamental enablers. The conditions that this type of environments impose to communications, particularly the high mobility, create challenges that have not ben solved by the generations prior to 6G. The evolution of mobile communications is expected to enable such new applications and services, not only with focus on communications but including positioning and sensing capabilities as well, which will require a new radio interface. This talk focuses on the new possibilities that are being discussed from a physical layer perspective, presenting alternatives that can cope with this high mobility regarding the waveform design, the channel estimation and prediction, and the way users and reference signals are multiplexed and resources allocated.
Experience now being acquired by the speaker in several collaborative research projects will be shared, namely, projects regarding remote driving and the application of AI to wireless communications. The remote driving application will be the basis for a discussion of the required KPIs, while the use of AI will help improve the communication and positioning capabilities of traditional OFDM and new multi-carrier waveforms, such as OTFS, CE-OFDM, FM-OFDM. The scenarios in which each of them is recommended will be reviewed and, given that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a flexible physical layer design will be advocated, which is enabled by the multi-carrier nature of most of the proposals making use of a common architecture.

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Ana Garcia Armada is an IEEE Fellow. She is currently a Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, where she has served in a variety of management positions (Head of Signal Theory and Communications Department, Vice-dean of Electrical Engineering, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of International Relations). She is leading the Communications Research Group at this university. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Bell Labs and University of Southampton. She has participated and coordinated a large number of national and international research projects as well as contracts with the industry. She is the co-author of eight book chapters on wireless communications and signal processing. She has published more than 250 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and she holds six granted patents. She is serving on the editorial board of IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (Associate Editor in Chief since 2024) and ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies. She is the Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing and Computing for Communications technical committee and the Vice President of Member and Global Activities of IEEE ComSoc. She has been awarded the third place Bell Labs Prize for shaping the future of information and communications technology. She has received the outstanding service award from the IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing and Communications Electronics technical committee, the outstanding service award from the IEEE ComSoc Women in Communications Engineering Standing Committee, and the IEEE ComSoc/KICS Exemplary Global Service award.

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David served in various leadership positions at AT&T that resulted in multibillion-dollar savings over the past 35 years. Currently holds 60+ patents and frequently appears as speaker at technical and leadership seminars and conferences throughout the world. Led global R&D organizations of more than 5,000 people at AT&T. Was responsible for the next generation SDN automation platform enabling AT&T’s network virtualization and 5G/Fiber networks. Well respected as an inspirational industry leader in hyper scale software and AI driven platforms with institutional knowledge and world leading expertise achieving best in class quality, reliability, speed, and demonstrable financial/service benefits! Work pioneered many of the world’s first innovations and promoted many distinguished industry leaders and technical talents. Awards received include CIE-USA AAEOY Engineer of the Year Award in 2017 and Executive of the Year Award in 2023, IEEE CQR Chairman’s Award, CIO 100 Award, AT&T Innovation and Patent Awards, and AT&T Corporate Leadership Award. Actively engaged in community, professional, and faith work.

Abstract

The Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), through its Committees and in cooperation with the European Telecommunication Standardisation Institute (ETSI) and the European Commission, develops common policies to harmonize the use of radio spectrum, satellite orbits, and numbering resources across Europe. These efforts are crucial for the development of new communication systems, including 6G. The CEPT roadmap for 6G outlines the main strategic phases, from research to commercial launch, and identifies actions for Europe to boost the development of 6G communications.
Vehicular networks in Europe are encompassed within Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Regulations in the 5.9 GHz band, where ITS operates, are currently being revised for both safety and non-safety applications to accommodate new use cases. Although regulations are technology-neutral, concurrent technologies wishing to share the frequency band pose challenges that must be considered and effective sharing solutions require full cooperation between spectrum regulators and standardization bodies.
Shared access to spectrum is becoming increasingly crucial, especially for future 6G communications, not limited to vehicular networks. The feasibility of sharing between different technologies and applications is already a hot topic, particularly in the 6 GHz band, where concurrent technologies for connectivity aim to share the band. Various potential approaches and mechanisms for shared spectrum use are currently under investigation, ranging from existing standards to new sharing mechanisms that could be enhanced by advanced techniques such as artificial intelligence.

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Dr. DORIANA GUIDUCCI is a spectrum expert at European Communications Office, the permanent office of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), based in Copenhagen (Denmark). Her areas of expertise include mobile broadband, as well as spectrum engineer and frequency regulatory studies on various matters. She is the supporting spectrum expert in several CEPT groups dealing with mobile communications, Radio Local Area Networks and Intelligent Transport Systems. She is also the expert advising the CEPT work on the future use of the 6 GHz band in Europe.
She has been the supporting spectrum expert for CEPT´s preparation and participation in the last two cycles of the World Radiocommunications Conferences (WRC). WRCs are organised by the International Telecommunication Union, the specialised Agency of the United Nations, to revise the Radio Regulations, which is the international treaty governing the use of radio spectrum and orbits at a global level.
She is also responsible within ECO for cooperation and liaison with academia and research bodies and is part of the coordination team of the CEPT Network of Women.
Her previous experience was with Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, the Italian research institution supporting the Public Administration in spectrum matters and ICT policies. She was head of the competence centre on ICT Policies and responsible for several research activities and projects, including pilot experiments for the shared access to spectrum. She completed her master degree and PhD in electronics and computer science at the University of Bologna.

Abstract

Current radio communication networks utilize highly advanced PHY layer coding, modulation and processing technique optimized for throughput, latency and multi-user concurrency. In many aspects, they approach the information-theoretic limits. However, this comes at the price of requiring a highly precise channel state estimation and real-time network/system state knowledge. The channel and network/system state have (especially for M-MIMO systems) a highly dimensional and dynamic signal space representation that typically consumes a large portion of PHY resources (pilot signals, etc.) to enable its precise estimation. The talk will present a framework for various design strategies and trade-offs that needs to be solved in dense and sensing-enabled radio networks with highly dimensional parametric channels.

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Jan Sykora is the head of the Digital Radio Communications (DiRaC) group. He obtained an MSc in 1987, a PhD in 1993, and became a Full Professor in 2007, all at the Czech Technical University in Prague. His research includes work on wireless communication and information theory, cooperative and distributed modulation/coding, wireless network coding and distributed signal processing, MIMO systems, non-linear space–time modulation and coding, and iterative processing. He is an author of more than 150 papers in those fields, including a monograph on Wireless Physical Layer Network Coding published by Cambridge University Press 2018.

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Jason got his Ph.D. modeling large scale systems and networks for performance and reliability. He has held titles including senior technical staff and director at USWEST, Qwest, Polar Star Consulting, and Tenica. He was the last Managing Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Denver Section Chair, and co-chair of IEEE Blockchain initiative. He is currently the President of the IEEE Reliability Society and writes a quarterly column article in Reliability Magazine. At CableLabs, he is the Distinguished Technologist working on Proactive Network Maintenance, Network and Service Reliability, DOCSIS® Tools and Readiness, Optical Operations and Maintenance, and reliability advancement for the industry. He was the RS Engineer of the Year for 2021, and CableLabs inventor of the year for 2020.

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Kostas is the COO of Local AI, a tech startup that he founded together with a team of AI experts. Local AI is focused on AI solutions for sustainability projects around Europe. Through AI, it empowers Green Transition initiatives of private and public organizations and has received funding by EU Horizon projects framework.
Kostas has extensive experience in network planning and optimization, having worked for 27 years at Cosmote. He was Deputy Director of Service Quality & Customer Experience Management for Fixed & Mobile. He was involved with several R&D projects including radio resource management, location-based optimization, efficient algorithms for radio propagation, and fleet management. His research interests were in the design and implementation of network-wide big data like for the on-line analytics of network performance vs. customer experience, and interactive presentation techniques using powerful visualization tools.
He received the Computer Engineering Diploma from the Technical University of Patra, Greece, the Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and Ph.D. in Mobile Telecommunications from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

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The talk addresses various aspects on the improvement of quality and reliability in communications at the radio interface for incoming 6G systems. Personal and diversity of terminals, impact of MaMIMO and of active antennas, and location accuracy are some of the issues that are analysed.

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Luis M. Correia was born in Portugal, in 1958. He received the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST (Univ. Lisbon), where he is currently a Professor in Telecommunications, with his work focused on Wireless & Mobile Communications, with the research activities developed in INESC INOV-Lab. He has acted as a consultant for the Portuguese telecommunications operators and regulator, besides other public and private entities, and has been in the Board of Directors of a telecommunications company. He has participated in 34 projects within European frameworks, having coordinated 6 and taken leadership responsibilities at various levels in many others, besides national ones. He has lectured 81 advanced training courses for industry and academia at the national and international levels. He has supervised 240 M.Sc./Ph.D. students, having edited 6 books, contribute to European strategic documents, and authored over 550 papers in international and national journals and conferences, for which served also as a reviewer, editor and board member. Internationally, he was part of 43 Ph.D. juries, and 96 research projects and institutions evaluation committees for funding agencies in 13 countries, and the European Commission and COST. He has been the Chairman of Conference, of the Technical Programme Committee and of the Steering Committee of 25 major conferences, besides other several duties. He was a National Delegate to the COST Domain Committee on ICT. He has launched and served as Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Portugal Chapter, besides being involved in several other duties in this society at the global level. He is an Honorary Professor of the Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and a recipient of the 2021 EurAAP Propagation Award “for leadership in the field of propagation for wireless and mobile communications”.

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Mikko has accountability for security requirements, standards, strategy and architecture, related to product development and management, and overall accountability of product security and product privacy.
He is senior advisor on Product and Solution Security to the CTO, and other executive Ericsson leaders. Mikko has previously worked as Head of Network Security and Head of PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team) responding, investigating and solving cyber security incidents and breaches with Ericsson customers globally.
Mikko has also engaged in industry collaboration through organizations like ETIS, FIRST and EU Commission work groups. He has also provided Subject Matter Expertise for committee hearings of the UK parliament and the German Bundestag in 5G Security.