Newsletter August 2014

Issue Number 6

An Initial Training Network (ITN) for LTE-Advanced Networks

Issue highlights

In this issue:

Issue highlights 1

Mid-term review and new

seminars 2

Latest research outcomes 3

Latest news 4

Upcoming events 6

Crossfire in social media 6

Furthermore, during the last

months, the project has been

very active in terms of research

and outreach activities.

Specifically, CROSSFIRE has

been present in the flagship

IEEE ICC 2014 conference, held

last June in Sydney, and it is

also going to have active

participation in the 2014 IEEE

Globecom, IEEE VTC, IEEE

CAMAD, IEEE CloudNet and

IEEE QoMEX conferences /

workshops, amongst others.

Moreover, 4 new patents have

been filed by Vodafone during

the last months.

This newsletter issue marks

the completion of the first half

of the CROSSFIRE project,

which will be ongoing for the

next two years. The Mid-Term

Review (MTR) of the project,

i.e., a contractual obligation

where the fulfilment of all

scientific, training and

management aspects is

assessed, has been already

carried out on July 15th, in

Barcelona. Details on this

meeting and on the new

seminars that were delivered

to the ESRs during the next

days are given on pages 2-3.

Additionally, a 2nd Open Day

supported by CROSSFIRE has

been organized in KCL, where

“Future Wise Views on 5G”

have been discussed (see page

4). Finally, the project has been

represented in the 3rd Qualinet

Summer School, held in Nantes

during the last week of August

(see page 5).

CROSSFIRE is committed to

continue conducting top-notch

research as well as to keep

disseminating its activities and

contributions to both the

scientific community and the

non-expert audience.

The project’s Mid-Term Review was held in Barcelona, on July 15th, 2014

Mid-term review & new seminars

researchers throughout the

project and their future

expectations.

Prior to this meeting, i.e., on

the 14th of July, the 5th plenary

meeting of the consortium

also took place, discussing

about project achievements

so far, future goals and

challenges, as well as

expectations from the MTR

meeting. Both of these events

took place in the famous

Media-TIC building located in

the 22@Barcelona district, a

meeting point for companies

and professionals.

The project’s Mid-Term Review

(MTR) took place in Barcelona

on the 15th of July 2014. This

meeting has been a contractual

obligation of the CROSSFIRE

project, and its main objective

has been to be assessed by a

REA project officer together

with a technical expert, in any

scientific, research training,

management, networking and

dissemination aspects. During

the MTR, the ESRs had the

opportunity to present all their

research achievements so far, as

well as to describe their

personal development as

During the next days (16-17 July),

the ESRs had the opportunity to

attend very interesting seminars on

“Analysis and Simulation of Mobile

Networks”. Specifically, four

different lectures have been

delivered, covering both theoretical

and practical aspects on how to

study and analyze LTE-A mobile

networks that are of interest for

CROSSFIRE.

First of all, Anastasios Giovanidis

(currently with CNRS - LTCI -

Télécom ParisTech) gave a talk on

“Stochastic geometry modeling and

analysis of wireless networks”.

Amongst others, the topics he

covered were: fundamentals and

examples of Point Processes, palm

measures, marked processes, shot

noise, the SINR cell, stochastic

scenarios, coverage probabilities,

etc.

Afterwards, Nicola Baldo (currently

with the Centre Tecnològic de

Telecomunicacions de Catalunya)

delivered a presentation about

“NS3 and LTE Simulation Tools”.

Specifically, he gave an overview of

the NS3 project, describing its

architecture, features and libraries.

He then focused on the LENA LTE

simulation model and explained the

implementation of both the radio

protocol stack model and the EPC

model.

During the final day of the

seminars, Giacomo Bacci (currently

with the University of Pisa)

discussed about “Game theory

modeling and analysis of wireless

networks”. He focused both on

cooperative and non-cooperative

game theory and described the

basics of static and dynamic games,

as well as Bayesian and repeated

games, amongst others.

Finally, Giuseppe Piro (currently

with Politecnico di Bari) gave a talk

on “Simulation tools to the

modeling and analysis of LTE-A

networks (LTE-Sim)”. He described

the architecture of the LTE-Sim, an

open-source framework for

simulating LTE networks that he

developed himself and which is

freely available here:

http://telematics.poliba.it/index.p

hp/en/lte-sim. Moreover, he

explained how LTE-Sim can be

exploited for research purposes,

e.g., for solving scheduling

problems.

More details about the content of

these seminars may be found here.

ESRs and lecturers (Giuseppe Piro and Giacomo Baldi) during the venue

ESRs attending the seminars on “Analysis and Simulation of Mobile Networks”

Media-TIC building in Barcelona

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Latest research outcomes

New publications:

W. Lu, M. Di Renzo and A. Busson, “Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis of the Error Probability of Two-tier Cellular Networks”, in

European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC), Bologna, June 2014.

Z. Zaidi, V. Friderikos and M. A. Imran, “An integrated approach for future mobile network architecture”, in IEEE Personal, Indoor and Mobile

Radio Communications (IEEE PIMRC), Washington, Sept. 2014.

E. Liotou, E. Papadomichelakis, N. Passas and L. Merakos, “Quality of Experience-centric management in LTE-A mobile networks: The Device-to-

Device communication paradigm”, in 6th International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (IEEE QoMEX), Singapore, Sept. 2014.

N. Hernandez, J. Heide, D. E. Lucani and F. Fitzek, “On the Throughput and Energy Benefits of Network Coded Cooperation”, in IEEE

International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet), Luxembourg, Oct. 2014.

R. Shrivastava, S. Costanzo, K. Samdanis, D. Xenakis, D. Grace and L. Merakos, “An SDN-based Framework for Elastic Resource Sharing in

Integrated FDD/TDD LTE-A HetNets”, in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet), Luxembourg, Oct. 2014.

Patents:

H. Elshaer, F. Boccardi, I. Thibault, E. Bouton, “Cell Association in a Downlink and Uplink Decoupled Network”, GB1407726.7

H. Elshaer, N. Scully, L. Anaya, “Carrier Aggregation Mode Selection”, GB 1412266.7

H. Elshaer, N. Scully, L. Anaya, “Resource Management for Inter-eNodeB Carrier Aggregation”, GB 1412264.2

H. Elshaer, N. Scully, L. Anaya, “Carrier Aggregation Activation”, GB 1412265.9

Giacomo Bacci on “Game theory modeling and analysis of wireless networks”

Giuseppe Piro on “Simulation tools to the modeling and analysis of LTE-A networks (LTE-Sim)”

Nicola Baldo on “NS3 and LTE Simulation Tools” Anastasios Giovanidis on “Stochastic geometry modeling and analysis of wireless networks”

Page | 3

Latest news

2nd CROSSFIRE Open Day

On July 11, the Centre for Telecommunications Research in the

Department of Informatics of King’s College London hosted a public

meeting supported by CROSSFIRE with the theme “Future Wise Views

on 5G”. The aim of this half-day event was to provide strategic views on

the path towards 5G networks as well as outlining key research

challenges and opportunities. Speakers from King’s College London,

University of Bristol, University of Surrey, Vodafone and University

College London have attended this event. The announcement of this

venue is given below (also available here):

“The evolution towards 5G wireless networks has not only sparked

strong interest from the wireless research community but also created

a mass media interest as a technology which will propel and accelerate

technological innovations in our everyday living. 5G research is

envisioned to tackle some of the most fundamental limitations of

existing cellular networks, inter-alia, higher data rates, increased end-

to-end performance, as well as lower latency, energy consumption and

overall cost. But, and most importantly, it is also about creating

seamless experience to the users by enabling personalized Quality of

Experience. At the same time, we are currently witnessing novel

proposed architectural frameworks in this direction that facilitate the

idea of softwarization of mobile networks for faster innovation and

quick roll-outs.”

Vasilis Friderikos from KCL giving the welcome note

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IEEE ICC 2014

On June 10-14, Marco Di Renzo (CNRS), Georgia Tseliou (UOC), Costas

Samdanis (NEC) and Salvatore Costanzo (UOA) (from left to right in the

picture) participated in the IEEE International Conference on

Communications (ICC 2014) in Sydney, Australia.

ICC is an annual international academic conference organized by the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Communications

Society. Under the theme of “Communications: Centrepoint of the

Digital Economy”, ICC 2014 brought together researchers from all over

the world to discuss the latest advances in communications technology.

During this event, Georgia and Salvatore presented their papers:

“Resources Negotiation for Network Virtualization in LTE-A Networks”

and “OpeNB: A framework for Virtualizing Base Stations in LTE

Networks”, respectively.

Hisham El Shaer from Vodafone on

“5G: A Mobile Operator Perspective”

Salvatore Costanzo from UOA

Georgia Tseliou from UOC

CROSSFIRE participants in ICC 2014

Latest news continued…

Qualinet Summer School 2014

QUALINET, the European Network on Quality of Experience

in Multimedia Systems and Services, has organized its 3rd

Summer School on “Statistical and learning methods for

reliable assessment of Quality of Experience”, held on August

25-28, in Nantes, France. Thirty students (PhD students,

highly qualified master students, and early stage researchers)

have been selected from institutes and universities from all

over the world, under the requirement that their research

interests lie within the area of QoE assessment. Eirini Liotou

from UOA has been selected to attend this venue.

The goal of this summer school has been to provide

participants with expertise, algorithmic knowledge, and

computational tools on best practices for reliable collection of

subjective and objective Quality of Experience data.

Specifically, as also described in the website of the summer

school, the topics covered were:

Methodologies for subjective QoE assessment and user

testing

Statistical analysis methods for empirical research

Multivariate analysis

Verification and Validation of objective QoE assessment

models and algorithms

Data mining and machine learning

Software tools for data analysis

During this school, the participants had the opportunity to

present a poster describing themselves, their research

activities and goals, as well as to jointly work on small groups

on a common topic, under the supervision and support of an

experienced tutor. The outcomes of each group’s work have

been presented to the rest of the summer school attendees

during the last day of this event, leading to opportunities for

future collaborations within- or between-groups in the same

or similar fields.

The QUALINET’s next and last meeting will be held in Delft,

the Netherlands, on October 8-10.

Qualinet Summer School 2014 – group photo

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Group work presentation during the Summer School

Secondments in CROSSFIRE

During the next year, all recruited ESRs are going to be seconded to another

partner for a period of up to six months. Selections have been made based on

the research area of each ESR and the best fit with the visited partner, taking

also into account each ESR’s special preferences or needs. The purpose of these

secondments is that ESRs gain expertise from a different institute / university /

industrial company and that new collaborations are fostered among partners.

Moreover, ESRs will inevitably gain extra mobility experience, becoming part of

different living and working environments and will create new networking

opportunities that could have a significant impact on their future careers.

Upcoming events – Save the dates!

Crossfire in social media

CROSSFIRE contact persons Prof. Lazaros Merakos Dr. Nikos Passas

Communication Networks

Laboratory

Department of Informatics

and Telecommunications

University of Athens

Panepistimiopolis, Ilissia

Athens, 15784

Greece

E-mail mitn.crossfire@gmail.com Mailing list crossfire@di.uoa.gr LinkedIn CROSSFIRE (open group) Twitter @mitncrossfire Wiki (members only)

We’re on the Web! See us at: http://mitn-crossfire.eu/

project consortium are going to

be presented.

ESRs Rudraksh Shrivastava

(NEC) and Eirini Liotou (UOA) are

going to participate in the IEEE

VTC ’14 and IEEE QoMEX ’14

respectively, both organized in

September.

Finally, during the next

months, new public talks are

going to be organized by all

partners and by all 12 ESRs, as a

way to communicate their

The CROSSFIRE special session

on “Network Virtualization and

QoE in Future Mobile Cellular

Networks” at IEEE CloudNet ‘14

will take place on October 8-10, in

Luxembourg.

The IEEE CAMAD ‘14, co-

organized by CROSSFIRE, will take

place on December 1-3, in Athens.

CROSSFIRE will be present in

IEEE GLOBECOM ‘14, to be held on

December 8-12, in Texas, USA.

Three different papers from the

research activities to the wider,

non-scientific community.

Crossfire is present in:

So please follow us

@mitncrossfire and

join “CROSSFIRE” group in

LinkedIn to keep up to date

with the project’s progress!

The research profiles of the

CROSSFIRE members may be

found in the Research Gate

scientific community.

The e-learning platform for the

training activities of CROSSFIRE

is available here:

http://crossfire.uoc.es/moodle/

Some courses allow guest access.

IEEE CloudNet ’14 will be hosted in the Abbaye de

Neumünster, Luxembourg

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