Nikos Pleros - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Digital Security
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Abstract: The need for enabling high-throughput wireless communications has turned the interest also into the 60GHz spectral band, as can be witnessed by the significant number of recently issued 60 GHz standards including 802.11ad, 802.15.3c, WirelessHD and WiGig. However, the unparalleled wireless capacity offered at 60GHz comes at the expense of picocellular coverage due to the inherent high propagation losses, limiting so far the 60 GHz wireless connectivity to WPAN applications. In the effort towards increasing the reach of 60GHz wireless networks and allowing for WLAN connectivity, the most promising solution seems to emerge by the convergence of 60GHz wireless with optical fiber access networks. In such a scenario, the high-bandwidth data signals can propagate as sub-carrier modulated optical streams over long distances through the optical part of the network and get transformed into their wireless form only when reaching the wireless access point. The fiber-wireless networking approach sets, however, a new framework both for the physical layer transport technologies as well as for the MAC layer, since the two transmission media (fiber and air) have to be treated as a single entity in order to allow the end-user to experience a seamless connectivity environment. In this talk, we are going to review the fundamental aspects of fiber-wireless network integration towards enabling 60GHz extended Gigabit WLAN networks. We describe the basic physical layer technologies and architectures and we introduce the notion of Medium-Transparent MAC (MT-MAC) protocols for arbitrating traffic over both optical and wireless transmission media in a seamless way. We describe the first modeling approaches for MT-MACs when performing in saturated network conditions, highlighting the benefits originating by the transparent interplay between optical and wireless network parts through demonstrating the increased user-fairness characteristics that are released by simple modifications in the original MT-MAC scheme. We discuss on the optimal network planning when 60GHz fiber-wireless WLANs exploiting MT-MAC protocols are deployed over conventional GPON access networks and we provide first, preliminary results about the performance of a converged 802.11ad-over-XG-PON WLAN network. Finally, we discuss on the opportunities of the basic MT-MAC protocol concepts for being applied to the evolving field of small-cell-coverage Cloud RAN architectures. Speaker's bio: Nikos Pleros (http://www.users.auth.gr/npleros) was born in Athens, Greece, in July 1976. He obtained the Diploma and the PhD Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2000 and 2004, respectively. From 2005 until September 2007 he was a Teaching and Research Associate at the Photonics Communications Research Laboratory at NTUA. In 2007, he joined the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where he is currently serving as an Assistant Professor. After moving to Thessaloniki, he co-founded and is currently co-heading the Photonic Systems and Networks (Phos-NET) research laboratory (http://phos-net.csd.auth.gr ), which is also closely associated with the Information Technologies Institute at the Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). His main research interests include all aspects of optical communications and photonic systems spanning from integrated photonic devices to optical networking concepts. His recent activities are focusing in the areas of optical interconnects, optical RAMs and fiber-wireless networks. Dr. Pleros has published more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and international conference proceedings, including also several invited contributions. He has participated in several research projects funded by the European Commission within the FP6 and FP7 framework programs and is now coordinating the FP7 research projects RAMPLAS and PLATON. Dr. Pleros received the 2003 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship that is annually granted to 12 PhD candidates world-wide for recognizing their research during their PhD studies. He has served in several Technical Program Conference committees, including Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference. He has co-organized the 2009 IEEE/LEOS Summer Topicals Meeting on ?Radio-over-Fiber Networks: Technologies and Architectures? and a Symposium on ?Plasmonics for Optical Interconnects? at OFC 2012.
60 GHz Very High Throughput WLANs over Fiber-wireless communication systems
