Tuesday November 23 at 9:15am EST

Keynote Title: Non Orthogonal Multiple Access for Massive Connectivity in Future Cellular Networks

Keynote Speaker: Chadi Assi, Concordia University, Canada

Biography: Chadi Assi (Fellow, IEEE) received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York (CUNY). During his PhD he worked on optical networks, and namely on lightpath provisioning and survivability. He spent a year as a visiting researcher at Nokia Research Center (Boston) where he worked on quality of service (QoS) in passive optical access networks. He joined Concordia University in 2003 as an Assistant Professor where he is currently a Full Professor. He was a Concordia research chair (Tier 2) between 2012 and 2017, then since 2017 he holds a research chair, Tier 1. He was elevated to an IEEE Fellow (class 2020) by the Communications Society for "contributions to resource allocation for optical and wireless networks". His research interests are in the general area of networks and telecommunications (both wired and wireless), (IoT) cyber security and smart grids. He serves or served on the Editorial Board of several flagship journals of the IEEE. He was the recipient of the Prestigious Mina Rees Dissertation Award from CUNY in 2002 for his research on wavelength division multiplexing in optical networks.

Abstract: To address the massive connectivity and the ever-increasing data rate requirements in the forthcoming wireless networks, sophisticated multiple access techniques should be elaborated. One potential access technique is the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). NOMA has shown to enhance the spectral efficiency and network connectivity and thus is identified as a key enabling technology for the next-generation wireless network, sixth-generation (6G). The main concept of NOMA is to allow multiple users equipment (UEs) to share the same resource (code/frequency/time). In this talk, we focus on the synergistic integration between NOMA and other enabling fifth-generation and beyond (B5G) technologies looking for further improvement in the system performance in terms of spectral efficiency and network connectivity, including cooperative communication, reconfigurable intelligent surface, coordinated multi-point, etc. We will also present a non orthogonal access scheme that exploits the partial overlap (i.e., similarity) among users bit sequences, and show that a much better enhancement to the spectral efficiency can be achieved, yielding gains of up to three times that of orthogonal access.

Tuesday November 23 at 11:50am EST

Keynote Title: High-Precision Networking for Future Internet Services

Keynote Speaker: Alexander Clemm, Futurewei, USA

Biography: Dr. Alexander Clemm (alex@futurewei.com) is a Distinguished Engineer at Futurewei in Santa Clara, California. He has been involved in networking software and management technology throughout his career, most recently in the areas of high-precision networks and future networking services as well as network analytics, intent-based networking, service assurance, and telemetry. Alex has 50+ publications, 50+ issued patents, 12 RFCs, and several books (including "Network Management Fundamentals"); he has also been regularly serving on the OC and TPC of highly-regarded management and network softwarization conferences for many years (e.g., IM/NOMS, CNSM, and NetSoft). He holds an M.S. degree in computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Munich, Germany.

Abstract: Networking applications have made great strides in recent years, including for latency-sensitive applications such as interactive video and online gaming, enabled to a large extent by explosive growth in bandwidth and "speeds and feeds" and advances at the application layer. Nevertheless, the ability to provide stringent service level guarantees over internetworking technology remains elusive and is providing to be an impediment to the introduction of new networked applications, such as industrial applications or teleoperations. This has led to increasing interest in High-Precision Networking, referring to networking services that are delivered according to well-defined (and, in many cases, ambitious) service level objectives. Activities in this area include IETF DetNet, IEEE TSN, and exploratory approaches such as Latency-Based Forwarding (LBF). Beyond technical challenges, additional considerations need to be made to incentivize network providers to offer corresponding services. This will require advances also in accounting technology, which ideally need to be considered as an intrinsic feature of such services as opposed to an afterthought.

The presentation will provide an overview of the drivers for High-Precision Networks and the particular challenges involved. It will then present LBF in greater detail as one solution approach to meet predefined latency objectives for "in-time" and "on-time" communication services. Subsequently, considerations will be discussed for how to account for such services in ways that allow for their monetization and the creation of new business value chains and a set of corresponding high-precision service metrics will be presented.

Wednesday November, 24 at 9am EST

Keynote Title: AI-Enabled Wireless Networks A Vision for 6G

Keynote Speaker: Melike Erol-Kantarci, University of Ottawa, Canada

Biography: Melike Erol-Kantarci is Canada Research Chair in AI-enabled Next-Generation Wireless Networks and Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She is the founding director of the Networked Systems and Communications Research (NETCORE) laboratory. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute, Toronto, and the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at University of Ottawa. She has over 150 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 6000 times and she has an h-index of 39. She has received numerous awards and recognitions. Recently, she received the 2020 Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing. She was also named as N2Women Stars in Computer Networking and Communications in 2019. Dr. Erol-Kantarci has delivered 60+ keynotes, tutorials and panels around the globe and has acted as the general chair and technical program chair for many international conferences and workshops. Her main research interests are AI-enabled wireless networks, 5G and 6G wireless communications, smart grid and Internet of things. She is an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Senior member and ACM Senior Member.

Abstract: 6G is expected to support a multitude of services demanded by Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable and Low-latency Communications (uRLLC), and massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) user types, that are already carried over 5G, and additionally provide extensive support for traffic emerging from Internet of Senses, high-precision navigation and coordinated machine applications. Heterogeneous devices with different quality of service (QoS) demands will require intelligent and flexible allocation of network resources in response to network dynamics. For instance, a highly reliable and low-latency network is needed to enable rapid transfer of messages between connected autonomous vehicles. At the same time, the same physical infrastructure is expected to serve users with high-quality video demand or even mobile AugmentedVirtual Reality entertainment applications. Next-generation wireless networks are expected to accommodate such diverse use cases. In addition, resource efficiency, reliability, and robustness are becoming more stringent for 6G. To meet this, future wireless networks must incorporate a paradigm shift in network resource optimization, in which efficient and intelligent resource management techniques are employed. Artificial intelligence, or more specifically machine learning algorithms stand as promising tools to intelligently manage the networks such that network efficiency, reliability, robustness goals are achieved and quality of service demands are satisfied. The opportunities that arise from learning the environment parameters under varying behavior of the wireless channel, positions AI-enabled 5G and 6G, superior to preceding generations of wireless networks. In this keynote, we will provide an overview of the state-of-art in machine learning algorithms and their applications to wireless networks, in addition to their challenges and the open issues in terms of their applicability to various functions of future wireless networks.

Thursday November 25 at 9am EST

Keynote Title: Security, Privacy and Resilience on the Internet of Health Things

Keynote Speaker: Michele Nogueira, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

Biography: Michele Nogueira is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. She received her doctorate in Computer Science from the UPMC/LIP6 – Sorbonne Université, France. She was on sabbatical leave at Carnegie Mellon University, USA (2016-2017). Her research interests include wireless networks, security, and dependability. She has worked on providing resilience to self-organized, cognitive, and wireless networks by adaptive and opportunistic approaches. Dr. Nogueira was one of the pioneers in addressing survivability issues in self-organized wireless networks, being the work “A Survey of Survivability in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks”, one of her prominent scientific contributions. She has been a recipient of Academic Scholarships from the Brazilian Government in her undergraduate and graduate years, and of international grants such as from the ACM SIGCOMM Geodiversity program. She served as Associate Technical Editor for the IEEE Communications Magazine. She serves as chair for the IEEE ComSoc Internet Technical Committee. She is an ACM and IEEE Senior Member.

Abstract: HealthCare has been a major field for the application of the Internet of Things (IoT). In the last years, we have observed an increasing economic and technological development in the so-called Internet of Health Things (IoHT) resulting from the popularization of health-related devices and their interconnection. IoHT has a great potential to revolutionize medicine and healthcare, offering easy access to health-related data to users and healthcare professionals. Further, it improves remote healthcare monitoring and the development of new applications. However, the nature of IoHT devices and communication technologies makes security, privacy, and resilience priorities for researchers worldwide. Also, the sensitivity of the addressed data and the criticality of the IoHT services attracts even more attention, not only from researchers but equally from attackers. This talk will present an overview of IoHT and its issues related to security, privacy, and resilience focusing on modeling and performance perspectives.