Hybrid-Fiber-Wireless Networks - The Future of Gigabit Access. Brian Hinman, President, CEO, and Co-Founder, Mimosa.

Deploying fiber to every home and business is economically challenging, as service providers worldwide have struggled with mass deployment. It’s become clear that the future of access will be a hybrid of fiber and wireless technologies, where fiber provides the high-capacity backbone, and wireless bridges the last kilometer gap to subscribers. Sustaining fiber speeds through the wireless links is the technical challenge, particularly when operating in residential areas with foliage and other line-of-sight obstructions. Future 5G operators have promised millimeter wave solutions to come to the rescue, but 20+ GHz frequencies are highly attenuated through foliage, limiting their range of applications. In contrast, sub-6GHz spectrum and advanced spectrum re-use technologies will massively expand the network capacity in residential areas, while delivering true gigabit service to every home.

Brian L. Hinman is the President, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Mimosa. For Brian, Mimosa is the culmination of a lifetime dedication to creating cutting-edge telecommunications products. Starting with video conferencing pioneer, PictureTel Corporation (formerly NASD: PCTL) and audio conferencing giant, Polycom (NASD: PLCM), Brian also led the way in the DSL industry as a founder of 2Wire (later acquired by Pace). Mimosa is the latest iteration of his vision to connect people through technology. In addition to his entrepreneurial efforts, Brian was also a Venture Partner at Oak Investment Partners where he focused primarily on investments in information technology and clean energy.
An engineer by training, Brian is a specialist in digital signal processing and holds 30 patents in the telecommunications space. Brian has also served on the National Board of the American Electronics Association and was Director and Co-Founder of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium. In recognition of his entrepreneurial spirit, Brian has received multiple awards including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Brian holds a BSEE degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Maryland and created the Hinman CEOs Program at his undergraduate alma mater. He also holds an S.M.E.E. degree from M.I.T. and an honorary Sc.D. from R.I. T.”

The Wi-Fi rEvolution: Sundar Sankaran, VP of Engineering, Ruckus Wireless.

A lot has happened since Wi-Fi was first introduced to consumers in 1997, and in twenty years, Wi-Fi has evolved from slow-moving connections to an incredibly adaptable connective technology. Today, the number of wireless devices has grown to 10 billion, there is one Wi-Fi hotspot for every 150 people and free Wi-Fi is available in most coffee shops and airplanes. No one would have guessed the progress that has been made in the Wi-Fi ecosystem but the process was no cake walk.
In this session, Sundar Sankaran, VP of Engineering at Ruckus Wireless, will provide an overview of the IEEE standards and how the original standard, 802.11b, evolved to what it is today. Sundar will also discuss the evolution of wireless chipsets, systems and applications, including what this means for today's consumers and customers, and what we can expect for the future of Wi-Fi.

Sundar Sankaran is a VP of Engineering at Ruckus Wireless, where he leads the Access Point HW and SW teams. He is a wireless industry veteran with extensive experience building wireless systems. Sundar joined Ruckus from Qualcomm Atheros, where he was a Senior Director of Technology and served as the overall engineering lead, with the responsibility to deliver silicon along with reference hardware and software, on multiple WiFi chip programs. Prior to Qualcomm, he has had stints at Intel, ArrayComm, and Infosys. He is a co-inventor on 18 US patents as well as several pending patents. Sundar earned a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University and Master's and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech.

SONiQ: Open Platform for Whole Home Wi-Fi Coverage. James Chen, Senior Director of Marketing, Quantenna.

More and more services are being deployed over Wi-Fi on today’s home networks. Existing applications such as real-time video, video conferencing, voice, and internet data traffic will join future applications such as VR/AR, telepresence, cloud gaming and others. To insure that all these services are fully supported anywhere in the home, the industry has adopted a multiple Access Point approach with the recent emergence of Google Home, Eero, and others underscoring this latest trend. However, all these solutions are closed solutions, meaning they do not interoperate with one another. This locks in the end consumer into a proprietary implementation which may not allow future upgrades such as additional access points or other protocols.
We will present SONiQ, an open software framework that that addresses this need. Specifically, SONiQ has ability to work across any backhaul technology such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, MoCA, or even Powerline. It is highly flexible and can interface with many of today’s Wi-Fi chipset solutions through a chipset translation layer. Its modular and layered architecture allows its steering, roaming algorithms to be customizable by OEMs and system integrators. Lastly, it is extensible to the cloud, where it can

James Chen is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quantenna Communications, a world leader in ultra high-speed Wi-Fi solutions. James brings close to 20 years of senior marketing leadership and technical knowledge to bear in defining and promoting Quantenna’s Wi-Fi chipset and Wi-Fi cloud RRM solutions to the world’s foremost Service Providers. His focus is to advance the Wi-Fi industry by illustrating new and innovative uses for Wi-Fi technology.
James joined Quantenna in 2014 from Broadcom Communications Inc, where he managed all of Broadcom’s LTE-Advanced, LTE, 3G and 2G modems. Previously, he was Senior Director of Marketing at Beceem Communications, the leader in WiMAX chipset solutions for mobile devices that powered the world’s first 4G networks in Japan and United States. He was one of the founding members in Marvell and Atheros Wi-Fi teams as well.
James received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is experienced in technologies such as Cloud Services, Mobile Internet, LTE, Wi-Fi, smart phone architecture, and semiconductor technologies. In addition, he has extensive business relationships with Service Providers, mobile operators, smart phone vendors, as well as hardware ODM/manufacturing ecosystems.

In-Home Wi-Fi Performance Monitoring and Management: Ensuring QoS across Managed and Unmanaged Devices. Metin Taskin, CTO, AirTies.

This talk will discuss how operators can identify, monitor and address issues with consumers’ home Wi-Fi using cloud-based data management systems. After surveying a number of Wi-Fi challenges and introducing the elements of in-home Wi-Fi Mesh networking, the talk will show how a Mesh-based monitoring platform can arm operators with a full dashboard of detailed analytics on historical events and data, as well as real-time feedback on active Wi-Fi connections. Notably, the system can be accessed remotely, as a cloud-based application that can be used by network operations teams or by field technicians via an iPad app. The talk will also discuss how adding intelligent, mesh access points modernizes the home network by replacing the single gateway, or gateway-plus-repeater model, with smart and resilient routing. Several real-world examples from trials with multiple global operators will illustrate how this new kind of platform provides key performance data on managed and unmanaged devices. It will also showcase how this system delivers actionable, privacy-ensured insights to engineers or field technicians tasked with improving, maintaining or ensuring QoS within subscribers’ homes.

After working as a research engineer at the National Metrology Institute of the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), Taskin continued his career in the United States: first at Hittite Microwave Corporation in Boston MA, designing radar and microwave communications system, and later at CISCO Systems in San Jose CA, in the Wireless Access Business Unit where he developed fixed wireless access devices. Taskin was responsible for system design outdoor wireless base station and subscriber devices providing wireless internet access. Taskin then joined the Wireless Networking Business Unit of CISCO as a system architect. He led team of 25 engineers that developed BR1410, an IEE 802.11a compliant Wireless Outdoor Bridge. Taskin received the “CISCO Innovator” award for a successful design and development of this product. Taskin moved back to Turkey to join the founding team of AirTies and currently works as the company’s Chief Technology Officer.
Metin Taskin has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Bosphorus University in Istanbul.

The Network of the Future. Thing Big. Think Faster. Santiago Tenorio, Head of Network Strategy & Architecture, Vodafone

Vodafone is always focused on delivering the best service to our customers, and we need to continuously expand the network to cope with in-building coverage needs, capacity demand and new services coming. The industry is moving toward site densification and porosity, and specially for 5G, latency will be the name of the game. In terms of network deployment, small cells are and will be key both in 4G and 5G, but we still need to come up with a scalable and cost effective solution (which at Vodafone we have called CrowdCell). Regarding latency, disruptive approaches need to be put in motion to cleverly store the content closer to the customer (geocaching), making sure network pieces of equipment can talk to each other in real time (meshed RAN) and minimising how far the information needs to travel to get a response back (local breakout). Additionally, we need to make the most of latest technology available, and accelerate the evolution of the new networks we are already building (NB-IoT messaging). Our vision is that any device could become a network element, so the network will be available everywhere. But to do so, new players need to step in (OpenRAN) and the business model may need to change towards a Network Over Demand approach.

Santiago Tenorio is Head of Network Strategy and Architecture at Vodafone. His team has been recognized as one of the most influential teams in the industry, driving the development and adoption of cutting edge innovations such as advanced Active Antenna systems in Radio, Virtualisation and Software Defined Networks in Core and Transport. With over 150 patents, and some industrywide acclaimed developments such as SingleRAN his team is shaping the evolution of 4G towards 5G. Before his current role, Santiago was Chief Network Officer in Vodafone UK where he led the team to deliver best network performance, signed and implemented the Beacon network sharing agreement with Telefonica, delivered the best NW Performance during London 2012 and launched Vodafone’s 4G service in record time with great feedback and customer satisfaction.

5G Wireless Communication: Enabler for 4th Generation Industrial Revolutions. Byung Yi, Executive Vice President and CTO, Interdigital Communications, Inc.

The rapid advancement of mobile communication technologies with unforeseeable computing power, ubiquitous broadband network, and web-based cyber world has been enabling the new hyper-connectivity among persons and things, opening the new era of 4th industrial revolution. Current wireless communication technical standardization efforts dubbed by “5G Wireless” are aiming for 100 Gigabit/sec throughputs, less than 1 msec latency and ultra-reliable connections, and one million devices/Km2 and supporting Machine Type Communication (MTC). This revolution will touch all industries and even our daily lives for good. Every industrial revolution has been triggered by new paradigm shift in all aspects of business and new technical innovations. This presentation defines the 5th generation wireless communications currently under full scale developments and tries to link with the 4th industrial revolution in every aspects of businesses. It will create oppertunities redesigning the business models and processes along the new paradigm and technical challenges to meet the massive connectivity, middle-ware, data analytics, cloud resources, and service/applications. The presentation will provide a sneak-preview of our lives beyond 5G Wireless/4th Industrial Resolution era.

Byung K. Yi is InterDigital’s Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer. As CTO of InterDigital, Dr. Yi is responsible for directing the development of advanced wireless and network technologies, and the advanced researches related to Robotics, advanced cyber security systems for the IoT systems, and the platform for advanced wireless communications.
Dr. Yi joined InterDigital in April 2014 from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), where he had served as assistant division chief of engineering since 2012. Prior to his appointment at the FCC, Dr. Yi was at LG Electronics from 2000 to 2012,whereas Senior Executive Vice President he headed the company’s North American R&D center. A former member of InterDigital’s Technology Advisory Council, Dr. Yi contributes more than 30 years of advanced wireless development experience, satellite system designs, and aerospace communication and computer designs.
Dr. Yi also contributes a strong history of industry leadership. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Telecommunications Industry Association and has served on the board of directors or steering committees of a number of professional organizations, including the Center for Wireless Communications, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 Technical Specification Group, and a number of others. He was awarded the prestigious CDG (CDMA Development Group) Industry Leadership award, been recognized by the National Engineer Week (NEW) Foundation, and inducted to the Hall of Fame by the School of Engineering and Applied Science of George Washington University.

Building a Verizon 5G Over-the-Air Communications Link, James Kimery, Director of Marketing for SDR and Wireless Research initiatives, National Instruments.

This talk will give a brief overview of the Verizon 5G specification and implementation challenges / solutions needed to establish an over-the air communications (OTA) link compliant with the Verizon spec. Both sides of the link will be shown covering both the Access Device and CPE (consumer premises equipment). This talk will feature a real-live over the air demonstration of the Verizon specification on a real working prototype and results will be shared from the initial prototyping exercise. Future work and extensions will also be presented on the way to 5G New Radio (NR).

James Kimery is a Director of Marketing for National Instruments SDR and Wireless Research initiatives. In this role, James is responsible for company’s 5G strategy encompassing both research and business initiatives. James also leads NI’s RF and Communications Lead User program which works with leading researchers across the world to accelerate the transition from theory to prototype and deployment. James also manages the company’s software defined radio business including the Ettus Research subsidiary acquired by NI in 2010. In 2014, James chaired the IEEE Globecom industry committee which was held in Austin, Texas. Prior to joining NI, James was the Director of Marketing for Silicon Laboratories' wireless division. As Director, the wireless division grew revenues exceeding $250M (from $5M) and produced several industry innovations including the first integrated CMOS RF synthesizer and transceiver for cellular communications, the first digitally controlled crystal oscillator, and the first integrated single chip phone (AeroFONE). AeroFONE was voted by the IEEE as one of the top 40 innovative ICs ever developed. James also worked at National Instruments before transitioning to Silicon Labs and led many successful programs including the concept and launch of the PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) platform. James was a founding member of the VXIplug&play Systems Alliance, VISA working group, and PXI System Alliance. He has authored over 60 technical papers and articles covering a variety of wireless and test and measurement related topics. James holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (MBA) and Texas A&M University (BSEE).

Use Cases for Next Generation Wireless Systems, Dragan Samardzija, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Nokia Bell Labs.

In this talk we will consider a number of novel use-cases and the corresponding communication-system requirements. We will focus on Industry 4.0 cyber-physical systems in different industrial applications, with humans either included in or excluded from the control loop. Virtual-cockpit scenarios will be analyzed, providing latency, throughput and reliability requirements. Radio-access solutions that lead to meeting those requirements, types of spectrum, system capacity and deployment analysis will be presented. We will argue in which situations the existing technologies such as WiFi or LTE would suffice and when the 5G new-radio is needed. Furthermore, the conventional versus dynamic edge-cloud architectures will be considered.

Dragan Samardzija received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1996 from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and the M.S and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers University, USA, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Since 2000 he has been with Nokia Bell Labs, where he is involved in the next generation wireless systems research. His research interests include analysis, design, and experimental evaluation of wireless systems. In 2014 he was promoted to Nokia Bell Labs Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, and became a research group leader managing four international Nokia Bell Labs locations.
Since 2000 he has been working on different aspects of UMTS, HSPA, LTE, LTE-Advanced, and 5G. Specifically, he has worked on multiple-antenna and CoMP solutions, backhauling, antenna-remoting, content caching, WiFi, IoT and cyber-physical systems. He authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications and numerous patents granted and pending. He taught a number of undergraduate courses and held numerous technical workshops around the world.

Secure, Robust and Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks for the IoT, Xiaolin Liu, Fellow and Kilby Innovation Center Director, Texas Instruments

Xiaolin is Fellow and director of Texas Instruments Kilby Innovation Center responsible for driving industrial internet research activities. She is chartered to drive various differentiated industrial- and energy-related connected system level solutions using TI differentiated embedded processors, analog and power management devices. Xiaolin has worked on various embedded system and software programs, including Industrial Internet Sensor Network Research Platform, Narrow Band Power Line Communication Systems, Narrow band and Broadband Wireless and Wired Communication Technologies, Wireless/wired hybrid Sensor Networks, Smart Power IPs, LTE/Wimax Prototypes, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth co-existence and digital mobile TV SoC, etc. Xiaolin is well-known as an embedded system and software expert inside and outside TI and has given keynote and plenary talks at numerous technical conferences. In addition, she is the author/co-author of more than 60 U.S. issued patents and the recipient of the special recognition awards: 2016 Asian American Engineer of the Year, Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and National Women of Color award in the Technical Innovation – Industry category. Xiaolin is the first TIer to co-chair the Industrial Advisory Board at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) Engineering School. In her free time, Xiaolin enjoys yoga practice, piano classes with children, classical music and leisure travel.

The Impact of New Spectrum on Design and Test, Satish Dhanasekaran, Vice President and General Manager - Wireless Devices and Operators, Keysight Technologies.

Since the dawn of the cellular age, spectrum policy has driven significant engineering discipline and investment to enable our connected mobility. Providing a fundamental underlying constraint on diplexer and multiple-access topologies in 1G, spectrum issues are driving new increasing complexity in 4G and 4.5G including now 50 LTE bands, large-scale carrier aggregation, and unlicensed access. Each new generation of mobile communications has either been driven by, or enabled by spectrum policy updates. Combined with the technology , these provide both increased opportunity for the industry to change the way people use their mobile systems and new challenges for designers and operators. It can be argued that the most significant updates in spectrum policy, those related to licensing spectrum above 6GHz for mobile communications and those associated with shared access spectrum, are now upon us. The opportunities are already manifest with investment in mmWave technology across multiple disciplines. But this is new territory for the majority of cellular radio designers, most of whom have little experience with electromagnetic wavelengths shorter than 5cm. Not only do we in the technical community have to address the opportunities and challenges with the physics associated with mmWave, we also have the additional constraints that will be associated with specific policy (bands, bandwidths, power requirements, SAR, etc.). In addition, new techniques related to traditional radio and microwave frequencies will be required with emerging requirements associated with shared licensed spectrum. The impact on the design and test industry as we move these technologies from the niches to mainstream radio include the use of unprecedented semiconductor technology, new and smart antenna schemes, much much wider bandwidths, new interconnect technologies, active spectrum management, and cognitive radio. This talk will explore the impact on design and technology and some of the emerging challenges to commercializing a mobile multiple-access network in the context of the new frontier of spectrum.

Satish Dhanasekaran is Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless Devices and Operators Industry Solutions Group at Keysight Technologies. Satish started in Agilent Technologies in 2006 as a Wireless Applications Engineer. Since then he has held several leadership roles as Technical Architect, Business development manager for Keysight’s Wireless Business for the America’s Region. In his current role Satish manages technology development and marketing of test products to the wireless industry.
Before joining Agilent in 2006 as a Wireless Applications Engineer, he worked at Motorola designing and leading development of RF sections for first-generation smart phone devices.
Satish received his MS EE from Florida State University and is a die-hard fan of the Seminole football team.