Welcome to NCC 2017

Abstract: Preparations for next generation (5G) wireless access is well under way. A important part of these preparations consists of different trial activities carried out by major vendors, often in close cooperation with operators. The main aim of such trials is to create an enhanced understanding of key 5G technology components, what their gains are and how they can be deployed. This in turn is an invaluable background for standardization activities and eventual development and deployment of commercial 5G systems. We will present the current status of Ericsson 5G trial activities, including technologies and use cases being evaluated. We will also describe our view on how these trial activities fit into the 5G standardization and development.

Abstract: 5G is a cutting edge research area and calls for integration of multiple technologies to work in sync with each other. Any researcher choosing a particular field has to rely on the availability of adjacent technologies in form of prototyping platforms so that he or she can focus on his respective field. Such prototyping platforms are available commercially in form of tools and frameworks and can be used to develop 5G testbeds. This presentation would be about two such platforms and the underlying complexity of implementation of such platforms. Also the talk would give an idea about how these platforms are being used for different kinds of 5G research.

Abstract: OpenAirInterface is a set of open-source software packages for experimentation with real-time deployments of 4G radio-access (RAN) and core networking (CN) entities on generic computing platforms and off-the-shelf RF hardware. We will present and overview of the current functionalities of the software packages along with the efforts towards tailoring the architecture for data-center deployments to pave the way for 5G experimentation. In particular, we will focus on the functional splitting architectures under development in the OAI community to allow for distributed processing between physical remote-radio units (RRU), physical or virtual radio-aggregation units (RAU) and virtualized radio cloud centers (RCC). We will also describe some of the challenges for virtualization of parts of the RAN on commodity servers especially for low-latency services. We will also highlight some of the work done in the OAI community to allow for heterogeneity between multiple radio-access technologies on the same computing fabric.

Abstract: It is well known that telecom systems are more and more complex and competition reduces time to market at a rate that has been never seen in the past. XILINX knows all these constraints and is working actively since the beginning in order to allow hardware designers to take advantage of tools at the forefront of innovation. Vivado is the backend tool that has been optimized for best QoR in the market with incredibly small runtime enhancing IP based design flow. The complexity of 5G algorithms is such that pure RTL implementation cannot be envisaged in most part of the receiver and a large portion of the transmitter. For these complex IPs, XILINX offers 2 tools that raise the abstraction in order to allow the designer to concentrate more on the functionality: System Generator for DSP and Vivado High Level Synthesis. System Generator for DSP is a blockset of Simulink designed by XILINX in order to design hardware systems using XILINX IPs in a graphical environment. Simulink block and libraries can be used to generate stimuli and control the result reducing though the development time. Vivado High Level Synthesis Tool is standing one step further: the IP is defined using C and/or C++ without reference to any clock or latency. The tool is driven through directives that will allow you to refine the implemented architecture up to a result close to, or even more efficient than a hand-written RTL code. During the presentation, these 2 tools will be shown along with their interactions. They will be compared in terms of Time of Development/Maximum Clock Rate/Resource Usage. The presenter will give some advices in order to use these tools for the right algorithms in the 5G testbed design.