Talk of Prof. Halim Yanikomeroglu



Halim Yanikomeroglu



Wireless Infrastructure of 2040s
towards Sustainable and Smart Cities and Societies

Abstract

The wireless access network architecture has evolved substantially throughout decades with every new network generation as more and more advanced technologies emerged. However, no matter how much the legacy terrestrial RAN evolves, it is unlikely that it would be able to cope with the continuously increasing and steadily becoming more ambitious connectivity expectations of humans, machines, and robots, mainly due to the fact that with the fixed locations of base stations (BSs), the network is never agile enough to handle the highly dynamic demand which is getting increasingly unpredictable and heterogeneous in space and time, in particular with the advent of ultra-high-rate use cases. This situation results in the over- engineering of the terrestrial network so that a user would be in a rather close proximity of a BS most of the time. However, blind densification means that many or most BSs will remain under- loaded most of the time. The mentioned overprovisioning requires huge investment (CAPEX & OPEX) by the operators, results in waste of energy, increases the carbon footprint of the cellular network, and means high connection fees for the end users. In the long run, relying mainly on densification for the evolution of the wireless network is not sustainable. In this talk, a novel wireless infrastructure will be presented which includes a new aerial access layer composed of HAPS (high altitude platform station) constellations positioned 20 km above the ground. With its bird’s-eye and almost-line-of-sight view of an entire metropolitan area, a HAPS is more than a base station in the air; it is a new architecture paradigm with access, transport, and core network functionalities for integrated connectivity, computing, sensing, positioning, and navigation, towards enabling a variety of use-cases in an agile, smart, and sustainable manner for smart cities and societies of the future.




Biography

Dr. Halim Yanikomeroglu is a Professor at Carleton University, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1998. He contributed to 4G/5G technologies and standards; his research focus in recent years include 6G/B6G, non-terrestrial networks (NTN), and future wireless infrastructure. His extensive collaboration with industry resulted in about 40 granted patents. He supervised or hosted in his lab around 140 postgraduate researchers. He co-authored IEEE papers with faculty members in 80+ universities in 25 countries. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Engineering Institute of Canada, and Canadian Academy of Engineering, and an IEEE Distinguished Speaker for ComSoc and VTS. He is currently chairing the IEEE WCNC Steering Committee; he is also a member of PIMRC Steering Committee and ComSoc Emerging Technologies Committee. He served as the General Chair of two VTCs and Technical Program Chair/Co-Chair of three WCNCs. He chaired ComSoc Technical Committee on Personal Communications. He received several awards for his research, teaching, and service, including IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize (2021), IEEE VTS Stuart Meyer Memorial Award (2020), and IEEE ComSoc Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award (2018).