Tutorials

Tutorials will be held on Sunday, 4 December 2016 and Thursday, 8 December 2016.
A FULL conference registration includes ONE FREE tutorial. 
Tutorial Registration includes ALL tutorials on the selected day (Sunday or Thursday),
access to the tutorial slides via a link provided, and coffee breaks.
Sunday tutorial attendees will have access to attend the Welcome Reception.


Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT01: Computer Networks, Present, and Future: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed
Presenters: Radia Perlman, EMC, USA
Donald E. Eastlake, III, Huawei Technologies, USA


The Internet has largely evolved from a core set of protocols that did not foresee the scale, the need for auto-configuration, defense against malicious participants, DDOS attacks, international issues with language and conflicting laws, need for privacy, auto-diagnosis, etc. In this tutorial, aimed at inspiring discussion and future collaboration, we review today's protocols: how did things get so complicated? Why do we need both IP and Ethernet? And if that wasn't enough, why do we also have overlay technologies such as TRILL, MPLS, NV03 and multiple encapsulations like VXLAN, GRE, and GENEVE? There were competing technologies. How did these compare technically to those that won out in the marketplace? We also discuss various newer buzzwords such as SDN and ICN, and discuss what is genuinely new, and what is useful for more than generating academic papers. How might the Internet be designed if we could start fresh today, knowing what it will be used for?

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT02: Breaking the RF Spectrum Crunch: Recent Advances in Optical Wireless  
Presenter: Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK


The popularity of smart-phones and tablet computers brought about the 'data-tsunami' and hence the wireless communications community turned its attention to hitherto untapped resources in the mm-wave and optical wireless part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Numerous optical wireless transmission solutions have been proposed, ranging from low-complexity on-off keying (OOK) to colour shift keying (CSK) and asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) based multiple-transmit/receive aperture (MTRA) selection aided systems. A range of promising techniques will be reviewed, followed by a number of open challenges, indicating that future is bright for optical wireless researchers.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT03:  5G Wireless Communications:  Enabling Technologies and Resource Management                               

Presenters: Lingyang Song, Peking University, China                
Zhu Han, University of Houston, USA


The aim of the tutorial is to present the enabling concepts and technologies for the next generation communication systems, and the necessary analytical tools to study them (such as optimization and game theory). There are three main objectives of presenting this tutorial: (1) The first objective is to provide a general introduction to 5G wireless communication and networking including the requirements for 5G communication, and the key evolutionary techniques from physical to MAC and network layer issues. (2) The second objective is to illustrate how such 5G paradigm will affect the design of other layers for radio resource management with distributed solutions in the before mentioned representative scenarios. (3) The third objective is to present other state-of-the-art applications under the umbrella of 5G networking schemes. This will include classifications of the different schemes and the technical details in each scheme, such as various M2M systems, wireless network virtualization, etc.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT04: The Massive MIMO Paradigm: Fundamentals and State-of-the-Art   
Presenter: Emil Björnson, Linköping University, Sweden            


The next generation wireless networks need to accommodate 1000x more data traffic and 50x more devices than current networks. Since the spectral resources are scarce, particularly in bands suitable for wide-area coverage, the main improvements need to come from a more aggressive spatial reuse of the spectrum; that is, many more concurrent transmissions are required per unit area. This is achieved by the Massive MIMO (massive multi-user multiple-input multiple output) technology, where the access points are equipped with hundreds of antennas and can serve tens of users on each time-frequency resource by spatial multiplexing. The many antennas give a great separation of users in the spatial domain, which is a paradigm shift from conventional multi-user technologies that mainly relied on user separation in the time or frequency domains.

In recent years, Massive MIMO has gone from being a mind-blowing theoretical concept to one of the most promising 5G-enabling technologies. Everybody seems to talk about Massive MIMO, but do they all mean the same thing? What is the canonical definition of Massive MIMO? What are the differences from the classical multi-user MIMO technology from the nineties? What are the key characteristics of the transmission protocol and why is the protocol designed in that way? Are there any widespread misunderstandings?

This tutorial answers all these questions. It covers the main motivation and properties, fundamental communication-theoretic results that quantifies the gains, and survey the state-of-the-art regarding spectral efficiency, radio resource management, energy efficient network design, and the impact of hardware impairments.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT05: Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Framework in CBRS/3.5GHz Band through Spectrum Access System             
Presenter: Kamran Etemad, Federal Communications Commission, USA


Recently the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a set of new rules outlining a novel dynamic spectrum sharing framework to be used in 3550-3700 MHz band. The framework relies on Spectrum Access Systems (SAS) which interact with, and coordinate usage of the band across three tiers of access classes aimed at maximizing the utilization of the band while providing protection of higher tiers users from lower tier interference. This tutorial provides an overview of primary requirements and objectives as well as key concepts, technical rules and policies adopted for spectrum sharing and operation in this band and where applicable compares them to other spectrum sharing schemes.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT06: Network Localization and Navigation: from Theory to Practice         
Presenters: Moe Win, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Andrea Conti, ENDIF University of Ferrara, WiLAB University of Bologna, Italy


The availability of real-time high-accuracy location awareness is essential for current and future wireless applications, particularly for the Internet of Things and 5G networks. Reliable localization and navigation is a critical component for a diverse set of applications including connected communities, smart cities, home automation, logistics, asset tracking, medical services, vehicle autonomy, military systems, as well as a large set of emerging wireless sensor network applications. The coming years will see the emergence of network localization and navigation in challenging environments with sub-meter accuracy and minimal infrastructure requirements.

We will first cover four basic components of traditional positioning: ranging techniques (e.g., time-of-arrival, time-difference-of-arrival); positioning algorithms (e.g., least-squares, maximum likelihood); performance bounds (Fisher information inequality); and network experimentation (for design and analysis of cooperative localization) in real environments. Secondly, we will discuss the limitations of traditional positioning, and move on to the key enablers for high-accuracy location awareness: wideband transmission and cooperative processing.

We will cover fundamental performance bounds, cooperative algorithms, and network experimentation. Fundamental bounds serve as performance benchmarks, and as a tool for network design. Cooperative algorithms are a way to achieve drastic performance improvements with respect to traditional non-cooperative positioning. In order to harness these benefits, we must consider realistic operational settings. To this end, we have performed extensive measurement campaigns with wideband radios.  

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30

TUT07: Wireless Communications and Networking with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles           
Presenters: Walid Saad, Virginia Tech, USA
Mehdi Bennis, CWC, University of Oulu, Finland


The goal of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive introduction to wireless communications using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while delineating the potential opportunities, roadblocks, and challenges facing the widespread deployment of UAVs for communication purposes. First, the tutorial will shed light on the intrinsic properties of the air-to-ground and air-to-air channel models while pinpointing how such channels differ from classical wireless terrestrial channels. Second, we will introduce the fundamental performance metrics and limitations of UAV-based communications. In particular, using tools from communication theory and stochastic geometry, we will provide insights on the quality-of-service that can be provided by UAV-based wireless communications, in the presence of various types of ground and terrestrial networks. Then, we will analyze and study the performance of UAV-to-UAV communications. Subsequently, having laid the fundamental performance metrics, we will introduce the analytical and theoretical tools needed to understand how to optimally deploy and operate UAVs for communication purposes. In particular, we will study several specific UAV deployment and mobility scenarios and we will provide new mathematical techniques, from optimization, game, and probability theory that can enable one to dynamically deploy and move UAVs for optimizing wireless communications. Moreover, we will study, in detail, the challenges of resource allocation in networks that rely on UAV-based communications. Throughout this tutorial, we will highlight the various performance tradeoffs pertaining to UAV communications ranging from energy efficiency to mobility and coverage. The tutorial concludes by an overview on future opportunities and challenges in this area.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT08: Practical Software Radio: Leveraging the SDR Revolution for Wireless Communications Applications    
Presenters: Jack L. Burbank and Russell Nadler, JHU/APL, USA


This tutorial aims to provide attendees with a practical overview of hardware and software SDR tools that may be of immediate use to wireless professionals today. The tutorial will provide attendees with a complete overview of the current commercial hardware environment, presenting an up-to-date trade study of commercial SDR hardware platforms. The tutorial will also present an overview of the most popular software solutions, information on their use and tradeoffs to using frameworks as opposed to native software development. The tutorial will then provide all attendees with the opportunity to follow along with the presenters in three hands-on exercises, which will demonstrate various capabilities of the SDR platforms under discussion using the GNU Radio Companion GUI; no programming experience required. This tutorial demonstrates the state-of-the-art in SDR software and hardware tools as well as highlights some wireless communications applications of these tools.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30

TUT09: Stochastic Point Process Techniques to Model Time Dependent Problems in Broadband Wireless Networks                      
Presenters: Krishna Iyer and Vijayalakshmi Chetlapalli, Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management, India


The behavior of traffic generated in wireless broadband access networks is getting more complex by the day, with several mobile applications in use. This has resulted in higher degree of uncertainty or randomness in the volume of aggregate offered load at the base station. Recent studies reveal strong variation of the aggregate traffic load with time. This means that network performance guarantees are required under non-stationary conditions. A prior knowledge of time dependent fluctuations in consumption of bandwidth during the course of the day will enable service provider to relieve congestion by offering discounts during periods of low usage. Very few analytical models exist for time dependent performance analysis of tele traffic, due to complexity of the mathematics involved.

At the base station of a wireless broadband network, connection requests of each traffic type, arrive at random instants of time and each request triggers a random service time of resource usage. This behavior fits in with Random Processes associated with random points on a line (Random Point Process - RPP). RPP is a class of stochastic point process developed fifty years back and deals with evaluating the moments of aggregate built up of the triggered random processes at a later point of time. The primary objective of this tutorial is to demonstrate the application of Random Point Processes and certain correlation functions of these processes, called product densities, for estimating time-dependent performance measures at the base station.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT10: Energy-Neutral System-Level Analysis and Optimization of 5G Networks   
Presenters: Alessio Zappone, TU Dresden, Germany                
Marco Di Renzo, Paris-Saclay University / CNRS, France
Eduard Jorswieck, TU Dresden, Germany


This tutorial provides the audience with a complete survey of the potential benefits, research challenges, implementation efforts and application of technologies and protocols for achieving energy-neutrality, as well as the mathematical tools for their modeling, analysis and optimization. This tutorial is unique of its kind, as it tackles both system-level modeling and optimization aspects, which are usually treated independently. Special focus will be put on two methodologies for enabling the system-level modeling and the system-level and distributed optimization of energy-neutral 5G wireless networks: stochastic geometry and fractional programming. In the proposed tutorial, we illustrate how several candidate transmission technologies, communication protocols, and network architectures for 5G can be modeled, studied and optimized for their energy-neutral operation.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT11: Heterogeneous Statistical QoS Provisioning for CRNs Based Multimedia 5G Mobile Wireless Networks         
Presenter: Xi Zhang, Texas A&M University, USA                       


In this tutorial, we will address the key issues and challenges on how to integrate the heterogeneous QoS provision techniques with 5G candidate techniques, including FD, D2D, massive MIMO, Cloud-RAN under the cross-layer design and optimization architecture, as well as the state-of-the-art theories and techniques for the heterogeneous statistical QoS provisioning for multimedia services over the cognitive-radio based 5G mobile wireless networks. This tutorial will also cover a number of our recently developed results on the design of heterogeneous statistical QoS-driven cognitive-radio based 5G mobile wireless networks under the cross-layer optimization architecture with emphasis on PHY and MAC layers. Attendees will be provided with an essential understanding of the current research of heterogeneous statistical QoS-provisioning over cognitive-radio based 5G mobile wireless networks.

Sunday, 4 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30

TUT12: Quantum Communications
Presenter: Robert Malaney, University of New South Wales, Australia


This tutorial introduces the key concepts and principles that underpin the emerging and exciting new world of quantum communications. The course is particularly aimed at Engineers wishing to develop an understanding of Quantum Communications for the first time. Quantum Networks are anticipated to be the core networking technologies of the 21st century. In fact, these communication systems have already appeared in the commercial world in many variations. The tutorial introduces the key concepts important for understanding, testing, analyzing and improving the performance of real-world quantum communication networks. Designed from an engineering perspective the course will first introduce the basic quantum physics that underlies quantum communication principles. It will then provide an overview of currently deployed quantum networks, discussing their relationship to classical communication systems. Potential research topics for the beginning quantum engineer will also be discussed.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT13: Stochastic Geometry-Based Modeling and Analysis of 5G Cellular Networks
Presenter: Ekram Hossain, University of Manitoba, Canada


Recently, stochastic geometry models have been shown to provide tractable and accurate performance bounds for cellular wireless networks including multi-tier and cognitive cellular networks, underlay device-to-device (D2D) communications, energy harvesting-based communication, coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) transmissions, full-duplex (FD) communications, etc. These technologies will enable the evolving fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. Stochastic geometry, the theory of point processes in particular, provides a rich set of mathematical tools to model and analyze cellular networks with different types of cells (e.g., macro cell, micro cell, pico cell, or femto cell) with different characteristics, in terms of several key performance indicators such as SINR coverage probability, link capacity, and network capacity. This tutorial will provide an extensive overview of the stochastic geometry modeling approaches for next-generation cellular networks, and the state-of-the-art research on this topic. After motivating the requirement for spatial modeling for the evolving 5G cellular networks, the basics of stochastic geometry modeling tools and the related mathematical preliminaries will be discussed. Then, a comprehensive survey on the literature related to stochastic geometry models for single-tier as well as multi-tier and cognitive cellular networks and underlay D2D communications will be presented. Then, a taxonomy of the stochastic geometry modeling approaches based on the target network model, the point process used, and the performance evaluation technique will be discussed. Application examples of these modeling approaches for single-tier and multi-tier cellular networks, D2D communications as well as cognitive and energy-harvesting communications will be presented.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT14: On Network Softwarization                                            
Presenter: Tarik Taleb, Aalto University, Finland                          


This tutorial will be shedding light on network softwarization, an important vision towards the realization of elastic and flexible 5G mobile systems. The tutorial will commence with a brief introduction of major 3GPP wireless technologies, namely GSM, GPRS, UMTS and LTE, comparing amongst the different relevant architectures and their evolution to the nowadays' Evolved Packet System (EPS). After a short discussion on the basic principles of LTE, the tutorial presents the major architectural enhancements that have been already standardized within 3GPP for supporting EPS. The tutorial will subsequently lay emphasis on the functional and technical requirements of 5G mobile systems and discuss relevant opportunities, challenges, and expectations. The tutorial will be afterwards touching upon cloud computing technologies, virtualization techniques, and software defined networking (SDN). The main focus will be towards the use-case of these technologies in the context of network softwarization to create programmable virtual mobile networks, highlighting the key performance indicators and aspects for ensuring carrier-grade service delivery. The tutorial will also cover the concept of network function virtualization (NFV), detailing virtual network function (VNF) management and orchestration, and showcasing NFV and SDN as key technology enablers for the creation of elastic and flexible 5G mobile systems. The tutorial will be then describing, using concrete examples, how cloud-based virtual mobile networks can be designed, instantiated, configured, managed, and orchestrated, and that using current cloud infrastructure management tools, such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight.   

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT15: Hands-on 5G: From Theory to Practice                        
Presenters: Jacobus Van der Merwe and Kirk Webb, University of Utah, USA


Our primary aim with this tutorial is to provide attendees with hands-on exposure to concepts and enabling technologies that will form part of the expected 5G evolution. Towards this end we will introduce attendees to core mobile networking concepts in both 4G and 5G, as well as enabling technologies in the form of software-defined-networking (SDN), network-function-virtualization (NFV) and software-defined-radio (SDR). We will do this by combining lecturing with strong hands-on components, thus not only providing attendees with a deep understanding of the topics, but bootstrapping them with the tools to enable practical research in this domain.             

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT16: Signal Processing for Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications    
Presenters: Robert Heath, University of Texas, Austin, USA
Nuria González-Prelcic, Universidad de Vigo, Spain


Communication at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies is defining a new era of wireless communication. The mmWave band offers much higher bandwidth communication channels than presently used in commercial wireless systems. Wireless local area networks are already exploiting the 60 GHz mmWave band, while 5G cellular systems are likely to operate at other mmWave frequencies. Because of the large antenna arrays, different channel models, and new hardware constraints, signal processing is different in mmWave communication systems. This tutorial will provide an overview of mmWave wireless communication from a signal processing perspective. Topics covered include propagation models and the presence of sparsity in the channel, power consumption and resulting hardware constraints, MIMO techniques in mmWave including beam training, hybrid beamforming, MIMO with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters, and channel estimation. Millimeter wave communication is a topic of extreme interest right now in the signal processing and communication theory communities. We also note it is a significant area of interest for the US Government, with the FCC just releasing a notice of inquiry for using mmWave spectrum for mobile communication and suggesting potential spectrum. This tutorial opens the door to future applications of mmWave to cellular, transportation, massive MIMO, and wearables, reviewing as well current applications in WLAN. We believe that our tutorial is very timely given the growing interest in mmWave for cellular communication in particular.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT17: Dedicated Short Range Vehicular Communications: Overview, Technical Challenges, and Applications    
Presenters: John Kenney and Gaurav Bansal, Toyota InfoTechnology Center, USA


In this tutorial, we cover the most important aspects of Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), also known as Cooperative ITS. This technology is in the early stages of deployment in North America, Europe, and other regions. The US DOT plans to require DSRC in new vehicles in the coming years. DSRC is used to communicate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to/from-infrastructure (V2I), enabling a set of compelling safety, mobility, automated driving, and environmental applications. This tutorial focuses on the safety and automated driving use cases. We explain the DSRC protocol stack, collision avoidance applications, and technical challenges for deployment. We discuss large-scale field tests and early deployment projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, e.g. the US Safety Pilot and the Rotterdam-Vienna Corridor Project. After presenting DSRC basics, we focus on a specific research problem that is currently of great interest: DSRC Channel Congestion. We discuss the merits of various approaches to address congestion, including avoidance and active control, as well as control modalities (message rate, transmit power, etc.). As a case study we present our specific research on adaptive message rate control, which is under consideration for standardization in the US and Europe. We end the tutorial with a discussion of the role DSRC can play in support of automated vehicles, including a framework for communicating dynamic road conditions to nearby vehicles.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 09:00 – 12:30
 
TUT18: Next Generation Satellites: An Interference‐limited paradigm
Presenters: Ana Isabel Pérez-Neira, UPC, Spain                        
Miguel Ángel Vázquez, CTTC, Spain


This half-day course presents the configuration and application of next generation satellite systems in front of the high throughput satellites that were first introduce around 2000 for broadband interactive services. We address the new phy and link layer techniques that are being conceived to make the new satellite systems compatible with the 5G terrestrial schemes. Essential elements include: multiuser detection, multi-spot beam precoding with hundreds of antennas, constant phase modulations, adaptive code and modulation, cognitive satellite, interference management, NOMA (Non-orthogonal Multiple Access). The school is related to the applications, methodological advances and basic theory of link layer techniques in satellite communications. We plan to touch the schemes that are implemented in the current standards, as well as advanced techniques that will support next generation satellite systems (NGS). NGS either target systems with a Terabit per second capacity or develop battery powered satellite user terminals for Machine-type communications. Compared to terrestrial systems, the channel impairments maybe more adverse, mainly due to the low received signal to noise ratio, and also the on-board processing shall be maintained with a very low complexity. In spite of it, and in order to boost capacity, the future satellite systems aim at non-orthogonal access schemes; thus, following an interference-limited paradigm. NGS should also allow a seamless integration with terrestrial 5G systems. Limitations will be discussed that relate to the available spectrum, GEO and non-GEO orbits, among others.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT19: Leveraging Big Sensed Data in the IoT: Challenges and Future Outlook     
Presenters: Hossam S. Hassanein and Sharief M.A. Oteafy, Queen's University, Canada


The Internet of Things (IoT) is proliferating on reliable and scalable collection of sensed data. Meanwhile, the growing realizations of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensing over smart devices (tablets, smartphones) and wired sensors, are all generating an exponentially increasing amount of data. The ensuing advent of Big Sensed Data (BSD) is generating critical challenges. First, collected data is mainly insightful to each deployed network, any "sense-making" processes to be built upon heterogeneously collected data faces significant interoperability problems, exposing challenges with varying quality, data-labelling inconsistencies, inaccuracies, time-sensitivities and different reporting granularities. Second, sensing systems inherently adopt a collect-and-report model, whereby collected data is indiscriminately pushed onto the networking infrastructure, regardless of the Quality of Information (QoI) or its value (VoI). Not only do we face scalability issues, but establishing reliable Information Services on top of BSD is not attainable over inconsistently collected, validated and reported data. Thus, the future of Big Data is hampered by the sheer volume of reported data, its uncalibrated discrepancies, and worse by the flood of redundant and lower quality data. Real-time decision making is inherently built on the efficacy of ubiquitous sensing systems, not on the aggregation of devices that are isolated in operation and management. In a time when important IoT applications such as health Informatics and emergency services require rapid and scalable access to contextual information about patients, mobile crowds and the general public, the status quo falls significantly short.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT20: Understanding Key Technologies for Customer Experience Management in 5G    
Presenters: Haris Gacanin, Nokia, Belgium                                 
Alexander M. Wyglinski, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA


This tutorial explores the latest challenging issues with emerging customer-centric network management. Specifically, the shift from managing network nodes and devices to managing functions that are part of services provided to customers will be addressed. These functions are mostly related to the end-to-end CXS management (CEM) with respect to different radio and networking technologies. This new area requires an expert knowledge across different communication layers in order to support diagnostics and troubleshooting of CXS, such as networking (i.e., access and core), data analytics (QoS/QoE), cloud and customer services. It is expected that different participants may find their interests within this tutorial. Technology implementations are not considered in this work, but rather the growing importance of a proper understanding of the physical-layer behavior associated with emerging complex systems. The above addressed issues capture new coming challenges and unveil necessary future directions across multi-disciplinary research areas.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT21: Challenges and Solutions for Networking in the Millimeter-wave Band        
Presenters: Joerg Widmer, IMDEA Networks Institute, Spain
Carlo Fischione, KTH, Sweden


The tutorial will highlight the most prominent technical challenges of and possible approaches for networking in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band. Communication at such high frequencies brings unique challenges, primarily due the high signal attenuation, which can only be overcome by the use of highly directional antennas. On the one hand side, this results in much less interference compared to omni-directional communication at lower frequencies, allowing for a high degree of spatial reuse and potentially simpler Medium Access Control Protocols (MAC) and interference management mechanisms. On the other hand, high directionality may cause deafness due to beam misalignments, whereas channels may appear and disappear over very short time intervals and cause sudden communication blockages, in particular for mobile devices. The tutorial specifically focuses on networking aspects of the MAC layer and above. It starts by an overview of mm-wave communication aspects and characteristics, and then delves into the most important network and protocol design aspects, ranging from beam-training and medium access to the impact on transport protocols and efficient network architectures.                  

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT22: Low-Cost Massive MIMO: From Theory to Practice   
Presenters: Shi Jin, Southeast University, China
Feifei Gao, Tsinghua University, China


5G mobile communication demands for substantial increase in wireless transmission rate, spectrum efficiency and power efficiency. One of the most promising physical layer techniques is the massive MIMO system that can deeply exploit the spatial dimension of wireless resources via large amount of the antennas equipped at base station and thereby significantly improve frequency/ power efficiencies wireless communications. Nevertheless, the high dimensionality of such systems increases overhead of the transmission considerably, e.g., the channel estimation, feedback cost, power consumption, hardware complexity. A successful deployment of a massive MIMO relies heavily on the availability of low-cost transceivers. Given these challenges, communication theories and signal processing techniques must be re-conceptualized. In recent years, there has appeared substantial theoretical progress on massive MIMO system. Most of works still require very high implementation complexity or try to provide a low cost solution based on some ideal assumptions. Hence, there still exist many challenging problems in both fundamental theory and key techniques waiting to be issued, for example, how to design a low-cost massive MIMO system from the aspects of the transmission architecture, receiving architecture, as well as hardware implementation? In this tutorial, we will try to answer the above questions and provide a possible solution to the low-cost implementation of the massive MIMO system.

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT23: Wireless Proactive Caching for 5G
Presenters: Ejder Baştuğ, MIT, USA and CentraleSupélec, France
Mérouane Debbah, Huawei, France


In the 90s, the world-wide-web traffic exploded, leading its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee to declare the network congestion as one of the main issue of the future internet. In this client-server model, a website is downloaded from the same server by every Internet user, resulting in bottlenecks in heavy traffic conditions and creating scalability issues in the network. This has been resolved by usage of proxy/caching servers and later on with the rise of content delivery networks (CDNs). The key idea was to geographically replicate the contents (i.e., video, picture, audio, etc..) closer to the users, so that the end-to-end delay is decreased and unnecessary usage of the infrastructure is avoided.
 
Nowadays, researchers are revisiting the same challenge in the context of 5G wireless networks. In fact, caching contents at the edge of the network, namely at the base station and user terminals, is a promising way of offloading the backhaul and decreasing the end-to-end content access delays, since the requested contents become very close to the users. Although the key motivation of wireless edge caching is similar to the caching in wired networks, a number of technical challenges remain unsolved and involve several scientific disciplines such as networking, information theory, machine learning, and wireless communications. The aim of this tutorial is therefore to present some of key techniques available in wireless edge caching and discuss existing challenges and future directions. Some of well-known technical misconceptions and business barriers are also elaborated.          

Thursday, 8 December 2016 • 14:00 – 17:30
 
TUT24: Wireless Powered Communication: From Theory to Applications    
Presenter: Rui Zhang, National University of Singapore, Singapore 


Wireless Powered Communication is a new and important research direction in wireless communication, which has drawn significant interests from both academia and industry in recent years. This tutorial will provide an overview of the key networking structures and performance enhancing techniques to build an efficient wireless powered communication system. In particular, this session will present state-of-the-art communication and signal processing optimization techniques to improve the energy transfer efficiency for the far-field WPT in both point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint setups. The tutorial will detail the two canonical models for research and applications, namely wireless powered communication network (WPCN) and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where wireless power transfer is applied to power the uplink and downlink communications in wireless networks, respectively. Both the information-theoretic limits as well as practical signal processing and communications resource allocation methods will be discussed to deal with the unique joint wireless power and information transmission trade-offs, which were not studied before in designing conventional wireless communication networks with separate uplink and downlink communications powered by fixed energy sources. Last but not least, the tutorial will cover key emerging applications of WPCN and SWIPT and highlight the promising future research directions in this area.