Making Cellular Networks Scalable and Flexible

Speaker: Dr. Erran Li , Alcatel-Lucent

Date: Thursday, November 21, 2013

Time: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Public: Yes

Location: 32-124

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Host: Dina Katabi, MIT-CSAIL

Contact: Mary McDavitt, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu

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Reminders to: seminars@lists.csail.mit.edu, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: Making Cellular Networks Scalable and Flexible

Abstract:
The wide adoption of smartphones has made cellular networks an essential part
of our digital life. However, existing cellular networks suffer from two key
problems: the lack of access bandwidth and the lack of direct control.

In this talk, I will present techniques to address these two key problems
through the principle of design-in-the-large. Design-in-the-large leverages the
numerous and their emergent behaviors to achieve scalability and flexibility.

In particular, to scale access bandwidth at radio access networks, I
will present the design and prototype of Argos, a base station
architecture that employs an unprecedented number of antennas
simultaneously to serve a smaller number of mobile devices in the same
band of frequencies. Both analysis and early experimental results
suggest this design can lead to orders of magnitude increase in both
spectral and energy efficiency.

To enable direct control of both radio access networks and cellular core
networks, I will present the design and prototype of SoftRAN and SoftCell
respectively. SoftRAN is a software defined centralized control plane for radio
access networks that abstracts all base base stations in a region as a vritual
big-base stations. SoftCell is a software-defined cellular core network
architecture that achieves scalability by moving functionality from packet
gateways to the many base stations and by aggregating traffic along multiple
dimensions—the service policy, the base station, and the mobile device—at
different switches in the network.

This is joint work with collaborators at Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Yale and
Bell Labs.

Bio:
Li Erran Li received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell
University. Since graduation, he has been with Bell Labs. He is also an
adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia
University, New York. He is an IEEE Fellow. His research interests are in
networking and systems with a focus on cellular networks and mobile
computing. He has published over 70 papers and holds 13 US Patents.

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This event is not part of a series.

Created by Mary McDavitt at Tuesday, November 19, 2013 at 3:29 PM.