Tarik Taleb of Aalto University

The telecom industry keeps reinventing itself. Soon, the world will be experiencing the 5th generation mobile networks (5G), also referred to as beyond 2020 mobile communication systems. 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. Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, and Cloud Computing, along with the principles of the latter in terms of service elasticity, on-demand features, and pay-per-use, could be important enablers for various mobile network enhancements, to specifically virtualize and decentralize mobile networks using general-purpose COTS (commercial of the shelf) hardware. 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.

Biography:

Dr. Tarik Taleb is an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer and a senior member of IEEE. He is currently a Professor at the School of Engineering, Aalto University, Finland. He has been 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. He was also serving as technical leader of the main work package, Mobile Core Network Cloud, in EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project, coordinating among 9 partners including NEC, France Telecom, British Telecom, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom Innovation, SAP, & Intel. Prior to his work at 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, the second largest network operator in Japan. From Oct. 2005 till Mar. 2006, he was working as research fellow with 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 GSIS, Tohoku Univ., in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively. Dr. Taleb’s research interests lie in the field of architectural enhancements to mobile core networks (particularly 3GPP’s), mobile cloud networking, mobile multimedia streaming, congestion control protocols, handoff and mobility management, inter-vehicular communications, and social media networking. Dr. 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. Dr. Taleb is a board member of the IEEE Communications Society Standardization Program Development Board. As an attempt to bridge the gap between academia and industry, Dr. Taleb has founded and has been the general chair of 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, Dr. Taleb has also founded and has been the steering committee chair of the IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking.

Address:Aalto University, , Finland