8.30AM | Building the network of the future, for the customer of the future
» Günther Ottendorfer | Managing Director - Networks, Optus

In the changing telecommunications landscape, innovation in mobile networks is becoming increasingly important to enable an outstanding customer experience. Customers have more connected devices than ever before, so the competitive environment is evolving from headline speeds as a measurement of network strength, and onto how capable will mobile networks be in supporting an increasing number of connected devices. As Australia moves to becoming a converged, high-speed nation - Optus is building Australia's first dual 4G LTE network that will have one of the highest spectrum capacities in the world.

Guenther Ottendorfer will provide an insight into what the customer of the future will look like, how they will be using their mobile devices and the impact this will have on the mobile networks of today and tomorrow.

9.00AM | Rise above the data storm
» Scott Nelson | Vice President, Global Network Engineering and Global Customer Delivery, Alcatel Lucent

The impact of data hungry mobile devices and the resulting wireless data explosion is putting increased pressure on wireless networks. This is a trend that will become more acute with the annual doubling of data demand in coming years.

In response, operators will need to engineer their networks by adopting a variety of techniques. This includes adding or re-farming spectrum, increasing spectral efficiency, increasing spatial efficiency (e.g. through small cells), employing alternate wireless access technologies like Wi-Fi to augment cellular capacity, and employing application/user aware intelligence to increase network performance and yield. In doing so, they will need to address areas such as interference management, self-optimisation, new backhaul requirements, site acquisition, regulatory barriers, energy supply and efficiency, seamless mobility, automatic network discovery, to name a few.

This session provides insight, based on Alcatel-Lucent's global experience and Bell Labs innovation heritage, on how to address some of these new challenges and their associated opportunities.

8.30AM | Network as a service
» Dr Håkan Eriksson | CEO, Ericsson Australia and New Zealand

Dr Eriksson will provide an insight into how operators can create value in the network and monetise the cloud.

9.00AM | NBN Co Update
» Gary McLaren | CTO, NBN Co

NBN Co has been established to design, build and operate the wholesale-only national broadband network for Australia providing a new, super-fast broadband network across the nation. NBN Co will provide the infrastructure that will allow wholesale and retail service providers to deliver advanced broadband services to homes, schools and businesses with speeds of up to 100 megabits/second.

Gary McLaren will provide an update on the progress to date made by NBN Co.

8.30AM | Scaling Wireless Capacity
» Professor Arogyaswami Paulraj | Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and Sr. Advisor at Broadcom Corp

The need for massive scaling of wireless capacity in mobile networks (say BPS/Sq. Km.) is obvious. There are many leverages for scaling that can come from cell splitting, adding bandwidth, multiple antennas, coding-decoding, relays, cooperation, interference management, scheduling, aggregation, time shifting, dynamic compute partitioning, spectrum management, etc.

Professor Paulraj will look at some of these areas and discuss their potential capacity value and associated implementation hurdles.

9.00AM | Signal Processing and Communications in Non-linear Regime
» Professor Vahid Tarokh | Professor and Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering, Harvard University

Communications devices (e.g. power amplifiers, and mixers) are inherently nonlinear, and most designers try to make/use devices that manifest almost linear behaviors in certain regions of interest. The operations of communications devices are then limited to these linear regions.

There has been some studies of communications and signal processing in the nonlinear regime, most notably for compensation of amplifier nonlinearities. In spite of this, information theory of nonlinear communications is in primitive stage. A similar statement can be made for communications and signal processing (for communications) in this regime.

Professor Tarokh will outline his efforts in this direction. He will discuss recent results on the capacity of non-linear channels. The results confirm the intuition that typical compressive nonlinearities limit the system capacity at high signal to noise ratios. He will then look at a number of remaining open problems that are being researched.

The presentation will consider the identification of nonlinear channels that can be represented by an unknown but small number of dominant non-linear modes (e.g. Volterra series terms), and talk about the development of a number of recursive online algorithms for adaptive identification of such non-linear channels. These algorithms have significant improvement over the conventional algorithms, in terms of both mean squared error (MSE) and computational complexity. Gains of order of 19 dB can be achieved at much lower complexities with an on-line implementation.

Having identified the non-linear channel, Professor Tarokh will discuss a number of open signal processing problems.