In addition to scientific papers, the MSWiM 2013 program includes distinguished Keynote Speakers.

Green Wireless: Towards minimum per-bit linear energy consumption in wireless communications Prof. Arturo Azcorra Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Madrid, Spain

Abstract:

Low-energy communications is becoming an increasingly relevant research area, due to both economic and environmental reasons. Low-energy is particularly relevant in wireless because of the limited energy available to terminals and the high consumption of the base stations derived from wide geographical coverage. Green wireless aims to formulate a long term research goal in the wireless environment. In the talk, the speaker will present the motivation and formulation of this research goal, with an overview of the associated research challenges. The talk will also address in more detail one specific case of energy-efficiency consisting in the cross-factor, which consists of the energy penalty derived from a packet traversing the system protocol stack.

Short Bio: Arturo Azcorra received his M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) in 1986 and his PhD from the same university in 1989. In 1993, he obtained an MBA with honors from Instituto de Empresa. Arturo Azcorra is an IEEE Senior Member and an ACM SIGCOMM Member. He has participated in and directed 49 research and technological development projects, including European ESPRIT, RACE, ACTS and IST programs. Azcorra has coordinated the CONTENT and E-NEXT European Networks of Excellence, and the CARMEN EU project. He has served as a Program Committee Member in many international conferences, including several editions of IEEE PROMS, IDMS, QofIS, CoNEXT and IEEE INFOCOM. He was the founder and first general chair of the CoNEXT conference series. He has published over 100 scientific papers in books, international magazines and conferences. In addition to his scientific achievements, Dr. Azcorra has a relevant track record of research management. He was deputy Vicerrector of Academic Infrastructures at U. Carlos III from 2000 to 2007. He served as Director General for Technology Transfer and Corporate Development at the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation from 2009 to 2010, and then appointed Director General of CDTI (Spanish agency for industrial research from 2010 to 2012. He is the founder of the international research center IMDEA Networks, and currently is its Director, with a double affiliation as Full Professor at University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M).

 
 
 

How much can we gain by exploiting buffers in wireless relay networks? Prof. Robert Schober University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

Abstract:

Wireless relays will play an important role in future wireless communication networks. This talk will focus on the new concept of buffer-aided relaying. In conventional relay protocols, the schedule of when the different nodes in the network transmit is pre-fixed and non-adaptive. In contrast, buffer-aided relaying protocols exploit the additional degrees of freedom introduced by relays with buffers and employ an adaptive transmission schedule which takes into account the quality of the different links in the network. We will show that this new approach leads to substantial performance improvements in relay networks with fading links. In particular, buffer-aided relays enable significant gains in throughput as well as outage and error probability at the expense of an increased delay. These gains are introduced by adaptive link selection and/or adaptive transmission mode selection. We will first introduce the basic concept of buffer-aided relaying using the example of a simple three node one-way relay network before considering more complex networks such as relay-selection networks, multi-antenna relay networks, and two-way relay networks.
We show that in some cases buffer-aided relaying protocols can double both the diversity gain and the throughput compared to conventional relaying protocols. Furthermore, in multi-antenna networks, buffer-aided relaying can also help to overcome the performance loss that half-duplex relays typically suffer compared to full-duplex relays.

Short Bio: Robert Schober received the Diplom (Univ.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuermberg in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From May 2001 to April 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Since May 2002 he has been with the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, where he is now a Full Professor. Since January 2012 he is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and the Chair for Digital Communication at the Friedrich Alexander University (FAU), Erlangen, Germany. His research interests fall into the broad areas of Communication Theory, Wireless Communications, and Statistical Signal Processing.
Dr. Schober received several awards for his work including the 2002 Heinz Maier–Leibnitz Award of the German Science Foundation (DFG), the 2004 Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications, the 2006 UBC Killam Research Prize, the 2007 Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2008 Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research from UBC, a 2011 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and a 2012 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship. In addition, he received best paper awards from the German Information Technology Society (ITG), the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP), IEEE WCNC 2012, IEEE Globecom 2011, IEEE ICUWB 2006, the International Zurich Seminar on Broadband Communications, and European Wireless 2000. Dr. Schober is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications.