Technology Strategy and the United Nations

Every technology introduced has overhead (entitlements). Support organizations such as operations, technology strategy, legal, contracts, product development, planning, design, care and others. Financial commitments such as capital allotment and maintenance.

Academically as we evolve and retire technologies the parallels to the integration of interests, cultures for a net win is unbelievable.

In some cases it's war, ATM or IP. In others it is co-existence, service delivery frameworks and network infrastructure. There are also disputed territories such as policy control.

Trying to deliver value to shareholders (citizens) and stakeholders (governments) while providing the right vision is a nightmare as technologies and vendors compete for the same pools of funding and attention.

Ibrahim Gedeon
Chief Technology Officer
TELUS

In his role as chief technology officer at TELUS, Ibrahim Gedeon is responsible for technology strategy, architecture and network support systems for the Consumer and Business Solution covering wireless and wireline technologies. A key part of his role is working with lead customers on new services and innovations.

Prior to becoming a member of the TELUS team, Mr. Gedeon operated an independent technology and business transformation executive consultancy.

Mr. Gedeon began his career in telecommunications engineering and research in 1990 when he joined Bell Northern Research designing signal-processing software in the cryptographic systems division. He moved to Nortel Networks in 1994 as a consulting engineer where he provided technical network design expertise to key service providers globally.

He was named vice-president and director of Data Network Engineering at Nortel in 1996, and vice president of Internet Brand Management in 1999 where he was responsible for IP/MPLS/ATM standards, engineering and market development. He was appointed senior vice-president, Wireless Engineering in 2000, and led a 1,000-plus member global engineering team responsible for operations, sales support and systems engineering.

Mr. Gedeon has a Masters degree in electronics engineering from Carleton University and a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut. He has held numerous leadership roles in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has received several professional awards, including IEEE Canada's Outstanding Canadian Engineer Award in 2000. Mr. Gedeon is recognized globally for his leadership in network design and strategic planning, having participated at numerous design and planning workshops on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cognitive Radio: Research Challenges
In a relatively short time span, cognitive radio has established itself as an exciting multidisciplinary research project with significant potential for making a difference to wireless communications. In this lecture, I will describe the progress that I have made in advancing certain aspects of research into cognitive radio with emphasis on robustness and scaling:
• Spectrum sensing
• Transmit power control
• Self-organized dynamic spectrum management
• Routing of packets in a cognitive radio network.

Simon Haykin received his B.Sc. (First-class Honours), Pgh.D., and D.Sc., all in Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is the recipient of the Henry Booker Medal from 2002, the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences from ETH Zentrum, Zurich, Switzerland, 1999, and many other medals and prizes.
He is a pioneer in adaptive signal-processing with emphasis on applications in radar and communications, an area of research which has occupied much of his professional life.

In the mid 1980s, he shifted the thrust of his research effort in the direction of Neural Computation, which was re-emerging at that time. All along, he had the vision of revisiting the fields of radar and communications from a brand new perspective. That vision became a reality in the early years of this century with the publication of two seminal journal papers:
"Cognitive Radio: Brain-empowered Wireless communications", which appeared in IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications, Feb. 2005.
"Cognitive Radar: A Way of the Future", which appeared in the IEEE J. Signal Processing, Feb. 2006.
Cognitive Radio and Cognitive Radar are two important parts of a much wider and multidisciplinary subject: Cognitive Dynamic Systems, research into which has become his passion.

Mobile broadband has taken off and todays networks, terminals and subscription-rates are in place which has increased data traffic dramatically in the mobile networks. Technology will continue to evolve which will affect and give many opportunities for innovation in the area of communication. In the presentation some examples of current technology trends and future challenges will be given.

Jan Färjh, Vice President Head of Ericsson Research, took his M.Sc in telecommunication at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 1985. After his graduation he developed signal processing algorithms for airborne radar systems. In 1990 he joined Ericsson and started to work with radio access technologies. He was part of Ericsson's first activites in WCDMA and became manager of the unit responsible for radio access research in 1996. The research performed in this unit has contributed to the evolution of WCDMA, HSPA and 3G LTE. In 2007 he became Head of Ericsson Research.

The standardization of the Third-Generation Partnership Project's Long-Term Evolution (LTE) initiative has reached a state of maturity and further advances are well under way towards the LTE-Advanced initiative. Three-dimensional (3D) spreading constituted by a combination of Direct-sequence (DS) spreading in the Time-Domain (TD), Frequency-Domain (FD) spreading across the sub-carriers of multi-carrier modems and Spatial-Domain (SD) spreading across multiple transmit antennas result in a significantly lower-complexity receiver design than their single-dimensional counterparts. Numerous other potential developments will be discussed during the panel, including the benefits of MIMOs and cooperation, implementational aspects, coherent, versus non-coherent detection, synchronization, etc.
The design of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems has reached a certain state of maturity, but virtually all designs have been contrived for idealized noise-limited, rather than interference-limited scenarios. A further limitation of MIMO techniques is that they fail to reach their full potential under realistic shadow-faded propagation conditions, unless their cooperation-aided counterparts are employed. Alternatively, they have to be combined with HSDPA-style adaptive modulation and coding.

The four basic types of MIMOs encompass space-time coding (STC), spatial division multiplexing (SDM), spatial division multiple access (SDMA) and beam-forming. Their challenging reception scenarios are encountered in the so-called rank-deficient situations, when the number of receivers is lower than the number of transmitters, which requires powerful non-linear sphere decoders, radial basis function assisted, Minimum Bit Error Ratio (MBER) detectors or Genetic Algorithm (GA) aided detectors - just to highlight a few. This evening-panel will briefly touch upon a variety of avant garde hybrid MIMO designs to set out a range of promising future research directions, including the innovative combinations of the above-mentioned four MIMO types, leading to the concept of Multi-Functional Antenna Arrays (MFAAs).
However, in realistic shadowing environments HSDPA-style adaptive modulation and coding as well as cooperation may have to be employed, in order to prevent the erosion of the MIMO capacity. This leads to the concept of distributed MIMOs, where the single-antenna based mobile stations may assist each other in the interest of attaining diversity and/or multiplexing gains.
The open research problems to be solved by our community are simply too numerous to be listed here, but we much look forward to involving you as a fellow researcher in the on-going debate.