Prof. Tarik Taleb of School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland

The telecom industry keeps reinventing itself. Soon, the world will be experiencing the 5th generation mobile networks (5G). These 5G mobile systems are expected to meet different strict requirements beyond the traditional operator use cases. Major obstacles to overcome in 5G systems are principally the highly-centralized architecture of mobile networks along with the static provisioning and configuration of network nodes built on dedicated hardware components. This has resulted in lack of elasticity and flexibility in deployment of mobile networks; rendering their run-time management costly, cumbersome and time-consuming.

On the other hand, mobile networks are nowadays architected to serve all mobile users; ensuring some degree of service-level differentiation, by making decisions on different user profiles, but with no specific tailoring of the functioning to the specific user needs. However, statistics demonstrate that users do not behave all in the same way. Furthermore, a single mobile network usually ensures the communication for all service types, regardless of the suitability of its available functionality to deliver these services with acceptable Quality of Experience and network efficiency. It becomes then apparent that having the same mobile network architecture serving all mobile users, let alone all mobile applications, despite the diversity they exhibit in their attitudinal response to mobile services, have to be rethought.

5G systems need to accommodate elasticity, flexibility, dynamicity, scalability, manageability, agility and customization along with different levels of service delivery parameters according with the service requirements. For this purpose, different requirements have to be met and numerous associated challenges have to be subsequently tackled. This talk will touch upon the recent trends the mobile telecommunications market is experiencing and discuss the challenges these trends are representing to mobile network operators. To cope with these trends, the talk will then showcase the feasibility of on-demand creation of cloud-based elastic mobile networks, along with their lifecycle management. The talk will introduce a set of technologies and key architectural elements to realize such vision, turning end-to-end mobile networking into software engineering. The talk will particularly showcase the need for the deep customization of mobile networks at different granularity levels: per network, per application, per group of users, per individual users and even per data of users. The talk will also assess the potential of Network Function Virtualization, Software Defined Networking and Network Slicing to provide the appropriate customization and highlights the technology challenges. The talk will also elaborate on a high level architectural solution addressing a massive multi-slice environment.

Biography:

Prof. Tarik Taleb is an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer and a senior member of IEEE. He is currently Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland. He is the director of the MOSA!C Lab (http://mosaic-lab.org/). Prior to his current academic position, he was working as Senior Researcher and 3GPP Standards Expert at NEC Europe Ltd, Heidelberg, Germany. He was then leading the NEC Europe Labs Team working on R&D projects on carrier cloud platforms, an important vision of 5G systems. Before joining NEC and till Mar. 2009, he worked as assistant professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan, in a lab fully funded by KDDI. From Oct. 2005 till Mar. 2006, he worked as research fellow at the Intelligent Cosmos Research Institute, Sendai, Japan. He received his B. E degree in Information Engineering with distinction, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Information Sciences from Tohoku Univ., in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively.

Prof. Taleb's research interests lie in the field of architectural enhancements to mobile core networks (particularly 3GPP's), mobile cloud networking, network slicing, network function virtualization, software defined networking, mobile multimedia streaming, inter-vehicular communications, and social media networking. Prof. Taleb has been also directly engaged in the development and standardization of the Evolved Packet System as a member of 3GPP's System Architecture working group. Prof. Taleb is a member of the IEEE Communications Society Standardization Program Development Board. As an attempt to bridge the gap between academia and industry, Prof. Taleb founded the "IEEE Workshop on Telecommunications Standards: from Research to Standards", a successful event that got awarded "best workshop award" by IEEE Communication Society (ComSoC). Based on the success of this workshop, Prof. Taleb has also founded and has been the steering committee chair of the IEEE Conf. on Standards for Communications and Networking (http://www.ieee-cscn.org/).

Prof. Taleb is the general chair of the 2019 edition of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC'19) to be held in Marrakech, Morocco. He is/was on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, IEEE Journal on Internet of Things, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, and a number of Wiley journals. Till Dec. 2016, he served as chair of the Wireless Communications Technical Committee, the largest in IEEE ComSoC. He also served as Vice Chair of the Satellite and Space Communications Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc (2006-2010). He has been on the technical program committee of different IEEE conferences, including Globecom, ICC, and WCNC, and chaired some of their symposia.

Prof. Taleb is the recipient of the 2009 IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Best Young Researcher award (Jun. 2009), the 2008 TELECOM System Technology Award from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation (Mar. 2008), the 2007 Funai Foundation Science Promotion Award (Apr. 2007), the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Japan Chapter Young Author Award (Dec. 2006), the Niwa Yasujirou Memorial Award (Feb. 2005), and the Young Researcher's Encouragement Award from the Japan chapter of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) (Oct. 2003). Some of Prof. Taleb's research work have been also awarded best paper awards at prestigious conferences.