W6: Dependable Wireless 6G Communication
Co-chair: Raheeb Muzaffar, Silicon Austria Labs GmbH, Austria
Co-chair: James Gross, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Co-chair: Janos Harmatos, Ericsson, Hungary
Co-chair: Pablo Angueira, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Keynote Speaker: Jon Montalban, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Title: Future Wireless Solutions for Critical Communications in the Industry
Abstract: Digital transformation of the industrial processes together with the advent of Industry 5.0 that emphasizes sustainability, resilience, and a human-centric approach is expected to bring a radical change to the manufacturing industry. At the same time, 6G as the next generation of wireless technology is envisioned to intelligently interconnect humans and machines from the physical world and their digital representations in the virtualized digital world. Advancements in cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence, and robotics, also opens new dimensions in revolutionizing these processes. Moreover, digital twinning of the physical entities enables support for engineering, maintenance, reconfiguration, and recycling of industrial automation systems. Accordingly, numerous visionary use cases are expected to emerge requiring deterministic and dependable communication capabilities. The challenge of bounded low-latency communication is being addressed by standardization bodies such as IEEE 802.1, IETF DetNet, 3GPP time-sensitive communication, and industrial alliances such as 5G-ACIA. Ultra-reliable and low-latency communication has been an important aspect of 5G communication that enables the support for determinism and integration with deterministic communication technologies and will further be developed under the 6G vision. Innovation and development are therefore needed in all supporting technologies. Communication through 6G technologies will enable and foster advancements in multiple industry verticals and is going to play a pivotal role in improving system efficiency and availability.
This event is organized to discuss the learnings from the past that have defined new requirements to explore for the future 6G system. The advancements in this direction and the current research trends are expected to be the highlight of this workshop.
Keynote Speaker:
Jon Montalban
Bio: Jon Montalban received his M.S. degree and Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He is a member of the TSR (Radiocommunications and Signal Processing) research group at the University of the Basque Country, where he holds the position of assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Technology. Additionally, he has held visiting research appointments at the Communication Research Centre (CRC) in Canada and Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland. His primary research interest lies in the field of network architectures for wireless communications. Currently, he is actively involved in research related to 5G networks and wireless systems for reliable industrial communications. He is also the co-recipient of the Scott Helt Memorial Award, which recognizes the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting in 2019. Furthermore, he has served as a reviewer for several prestigious international journals and conferences in the area of wireless communications and currently holds the position of Associate Editor for IEEE Access and IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting.
Co-chairs Bios:
Raheeb Muzaffar
Bio: Raheeb Muzaffar has more than 15 years of experience in the field of communication engineering and information technology both in the academic and industrial sectors. He is currently working as a senior scientist in the wireless communication research unit at Silicon Austria Labs. He received the M.S. degree in information technology from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan in 2006 and a Doctorate degree in 2016 in the field of Electronic Engineering from the University of Klagenfurt, Austria and Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom under the Erasmus Mundus joint Doctorate programme specializing in multimedia communication in drone networks. From 2016 to 2020, he worked as a researcher with Lakeside Labs GmbH, Austria where he was involved in several projects related to drone navigation and communication using WiFi and 4G/5G cellular systems. His current work focuses on the research and development of 5G/6G communication for the industrial internet of things, wireless time-sensitive networking, and communication functional safety. Post his M.S. degree he gained more than 6 years of professional experience with national and multinational organizations such as Sitronics Telecom Solutions, United Nations Children’s Fund, and USAID in the field of IT, telecom, network, system, and web administration. His technical expertise extends to system analysis, design, quality assurance, and capacity building. He has authored several research articles published in prestigious journals and conferences and has been involved in several national and international research projects.
James Gross
Bio: James Gross is a professor with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm since November 2012. He is associate director of KTH Digital Futures and a co-director of KTH’s comptence center on edge computing TECoSA. From 2014 – 2020 he was a member of the board of KTH’s Innovative Centre for Embedded Systems, while he served from 2016 – 2019 as director for KTH’s ACCESS Linnaeus Centre. His research interests are broadly in the area of mobile systems & networks, with a focus on critical machine-to-machine communications, edge computing, resource allocation as well as performance evaluation methods (in particular stochastic network calculus as well as age of information). Prior to joining KTH, he was assistant professor and head of the Mobile Network Performance Group at RWTH Aachen University from 2008 – 2012 as well as a member of the DFG-funded UMIC research centre of RWTH. James studied at TU Berlin and UC San Diego, and received his PhD from TU Berlin in 2006. James has published about 150 (peer-reviewed) papers in international journals and conferences. His work has been awarded multiple times, among them the best paper awards at ACM MSWiM 2015, the best demo paper award at IEEE WoWMoM 2015, the best paper award at IEEE WoWMoM 2009 and the best paper award at European Wireless 2009. In 2007, James was the recipient of the ITG/KuVS dissertation award for his PhD thesis. James currently serves as Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
Janos Harmatos
Bio: János Harmatos is currently working as a master researcher at Ericsson in the field of assurance of mission-critical cloud and communication services. He received his PhD in the field of Communication Networks from Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 2005, after which he joined Ericsson Research Hungary. Ha has wide-spread research experience, covering various areas, such as mobile backhaul network design, radio resource allocation schemes, 5G network-enabled factory automation deployments, and reliable service orchestration in a multi-domain, multi-provider ecosystem. He also possesses expertise in the system integration of industrial networks and edge computing. In recent years, he has extensively investigated reliable, cloud-native control application solutions for Industry 4.0, as well as the cloudification aspects of TSN reliability and time-aware features.
He has actively participated in the standardization of URLLC and 5G-TSN in 3GPP SA2, as well as Closed-loop control standardization in ETSI ZSM and 3GPP SA5. Additionally, he has made contributions to standardization in the edge computing area in 5G-ACIA and 3GPP SA2, along with the Industrial IoT area in 3GPP SA2. Currently, his focus is on addressing the challenges of the 5G/6G-enabled integration of time-aware edge computing and deterministic communication services to provide end-to-end time-critical, dependable solutions.
He has published more than 25 international conference and journal papers and has over 40 filed invention disclosures. He has been actively involved in various national and international research projects.
Pablo Angueira
Bio: Pablo Angueira received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunication engineering from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, in 1997 and 2002, respectively. He joined the Communications Engineering Department, University of the Basque Country in 1998, where he is currently a Full Professor. He is part of the staff of the Signal Processing and Radiocommunication Lab, where he has been involved in research on digital broadcasting (DVB-T, DRM, T-DAB, DVB-T2, DVB-NGH, and ATSC 3.0) for more than 20 years. He is a coauthor of an extensive list of papers in international peerreviewed journals, and many conference presentations in digital broadcasting. He has also coauthored several contributions to the ITU-R working groups WP6 and WP3. His main research interests are signal processing, network planning, and spectrum management applied to different fields. He is currently involved in research activities related to broadcasting in 5G and wireless systems for factory automation applications. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, a member of the IEEE BMSB International Steering Committee, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE BTS. He serves as the Vice President of Publications on the Administrative Committee of the IEEE BTS.