The next generation of mobile telecommunications networks, called 5G, is born with a vision that goes far beyond providing enhanced broadband but stands as data access for people and services focusing on different verticals such as health, agriculture, entertainment, energy, mobility, homes, factories, and cities.
As a driver for a new wave of the digital economy with a profound impact on our society, 5G poses challenges related to the research, development, and deployment.
This seminar on 5G will give a glimpse on future trends, implementation, optimization issues and fields of application, including not only aspects of spectrum management but also the research efforts toward the application of millimeter wavebands and massive MIMO.
2:15pm | 5G expectations and implementation challenges
Doutor Francisco Fontes, Instituto de Telecomunicações & Altice Labs -
2:45pm | 5G New Radio and the New Network Architecture
Prof. Fernando J. Velez, Instituto de Telecomunicações & UBI
3:10pm | Impact of Nonlinearieties in Massive MIMO mmWave Systems
Doutora Sara Teodoro, Instituto de Telecomunicações
3:35pm | Spectrum Management and Sharing for 5G Areal Small Cells
Prof. Pedro Sebastião, Instituto de Telecomunicações & ISCTE-IUL
4:00pm | Farewell coffee
Short Biographies
Francisco Fontes received his degree in Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon (Sep/91) and his PhD (Nov/00) from the Technical University of Madrid, in the Telematics Engineering Department, in the area of Distributed Management of Telecommunication Networks.
In September 1991, he started working at Altice Labs (former Telecommunication Studies Center and later PT Inovação), where he currently is a senior technology consultant.
He specialized in IP networks and services, focusing on local and fixed access networks (DSL, GPON and HFC), IPv6 and Multicast, but also on IMS, LTE / EPC and VoLTE, C-RAN and MEC. More recently, he focused in 5G standardization and related technologies (e.g. SDN and NFV), deployment scenarios and potential use cases.
His main activity has been in research (mainly via participation in several EC-funded projects, from RACE II to H2020, and national P2020 program), development projects, demonstration, implementation of customer solutions, technical training for senior managers, and internal and external consulting. Currently he is leading a national consortium (5Go.pt) to develop 5G technology and services benefiting from it.
From Sep / 2002 to Sep / 2012, he collaborated with the University of Aveiro, Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics (DETI) as guest lecturer, professor and coordinator of MsC and PhD students in the areas of IP telecommunications networks and related services. He is a senior researcher at the Telecommunication Institute and a member of the Management Committee of the Pole of Aveiro.
Fernando J. Velez (M93SM05) received the Licenciado, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon in 1993, 1996 and 2001, respectively. Since 1995 he has been with the Department of Electromechanical Engineering of Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, where he is Assistant Professor. He is also a researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações. Fernando was an IEF Marie Curie Research Fellow in King’s College London in 2008/09 and a Marie Curie ERG fellow at Universidade da Beira Interior, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. He participated in several European and Portuguese research projects on mobile communications and has authored three books, fourteen book chapters, and over 150 papers and communications in international journals and conferences. Four Ph.D. students succeeded in concluding their thesis from 2011 until 2014, and got prestigious positions in industry. Currently he is supervising four PhD students. Fernando is currently the IEEE VTS Region 8 (Europe and Africa) Chapter Coordinator (nominated by VTS in 2010). He is also the adjunct coordinator from the Telecommunications Specialization of Ordem dos Engenheiros. His main research areas are cellular planning tools, traffic from mobility, cross-layer design, spectrum management, RF energy harvesting, wearable sensors and WBANS, and cost/revenue performance of advanced mobile communication systems.
Sara Teodoro received her Licenciatura (five years) degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Coimbra in 2004 and her Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of the University of Aveiro in 2011. She has lecturer experience as assistant in the Department of Electronics of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria from 2005 to 2008. She is currently a Post-Doctoral researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações, in University of Aveiro. The research work developed is in cooperative diversity and distributed space-time/frequency codes area applied to OFDM systems, as well as in interference alignment and quantization techniques for wireless communications. She has been involved in national and European projects as CADWIN and CODIV. Her current interests are in nonlinear effects on Massive MIMO schemes.
Pedro Sebastião, Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST, is currently lecturer at ISCTE-IUL's Information Science and Technology Department, and Board director of AUDAX-ISCTE - Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at ISCTE, responsible for the LABSLISBOA incubator, and a researcher at Institute of Telecommunications.
His main researching interests are in monitoring, control and communications of drones, unmanned vehicles, planning tools, stochastic process (modeling and efficient simulations), internet of things, efficient communication systems.
He has supervised several MSc dissertations and doctoral theses. He is the author or co-author of more than two hundred scientific articles and he has been responsible for several national and international R&D projects. He has been an expert and evaluator of more than one hundred national and international Civil and Defense R&D projects. It has several scientific, engineering and pedagogical awards. In addition, he has organized or co-organized more than fifty national and international scientific conferences. He planned and developed several postgraduate courses in technologies and management, entrepreneurship and innovation and transfer of technology and innovation. He has supported several projects involving technology transfer and creation of start-ups and spinoffs of value to society and market.
He developed his professional activity in the National Defense Industries, initially in the Office of Studies and later as board director of the Quality Department of the Production of New Products and Technologies. He was also responsible for systems of communications technology in the Nokia-Siemens business area.
Available Abstracts
5G expectations and implementation challenges
5G is the next generation of wireless, cellular communications. It was defined by ITU-R with a strong aspiration: to “enable a seamlessly connected society in the 2020 timeframe and beyond that brings together people along with things, data, applications, transport systems and cities in a smart networked communications environment”.
In order to succeed, 5G must present significant performance gains relatively to existing technologies, and be efficient and flexible enough to support the tremendous variety of targeted use cases. Besides enhancing mobile broadband and continuing evolving to massive IoT, 5G will expand to critical IoT, where low latency and ultra reliability are mandatory.
A 5G System is composed by two main parts: a new radio interface (5G-NR) and a new core network (5GC). 5G-NR is expected to be ubiquitous and connect all sort of devices, being an universal radio interface. The 5GC is expected to connect the new 5G radio but also non-3GPP accesses (wireless and wired) and minimize access dependencies.
Besides the intrinsic technical challenges of the technology to be overcome until it is fully specified in 3GPP Rel-16, its deployment presents additional challenges.
First, it will need to operate at low (<1GHz) and high frequencies (mmWave). High frequencies provide capacity but coverage is limited. This requires a huge cell densification. Second, the supporting transport network must be much more capillary and have high capacity. At the same time, virtualization must also extend to the edge and support the distributed realization of the 5G-NR. 5G also needs Edge Computing to support the low latency services.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are required to effectively design and operate 5G networks efficiently.
Summarizing, to achieve total success with 5G, the technology must answer its own challenges but its deployment and operation is also challenging.