Tuesday, July 16th08.30 - 09.00 | Registration & Einstein Bros. Bagels Breakfast | 09.00 - 10.00 | Keynote: NI Wireless Research and Prototyping Platform Ian C. Wong - National Instruments | 10.10 - 11:10 | RF and Microwave System Design Introduction to the Dark Art Erik Luther As wireless communications designers, we often abstract away many of the real-world hardware aspects of the wireless system so that we can focus on just one layer of the stack. However, these aspects of the system are increasingly important as the industry moves to higher frequencies, wider bandwidths, and lower-cost components. In this talk, we introduce the challenges faced in RF and Microwave design and considerations necessary to move from theoretical simulation to real-world prototype. Prototyping has proven valuable in both demonstrating the efficacy of research and moving research towards commercialization.
In addition to touching on RF hardware fundamentals, we discuss strategies for prototyping the hardware side of your research faster and more efficiently. We’ll also discuss the technical challenges, opportunity, and limitations of hardware-based prototyping and paint a vision for how these challenges might be overcome citing real-world examples. | 11.20 - 12:20 | Digital and hardware solutions to mitigate the high PAPR problem of OFDM signals in RF power amplifiers Tommaso Cappello - Research Associate, University of Colorado Boulder This talk discusses digital and hardware techniques to mitigate the high peak-to-average-ratio (PAPR) problem in wideband OFDM signals (5G). The high-PAPR problem can be mitigated through digital baseband techniques such as digital pre-distortion (DPD), crest factor reduction, and mixed approaches. However, due to the demanding requirements in both high PAPR and bandwidth in 5G systems, a mixed combination of digital and analog techniques is key in order to achieve efficient amplification of such signals. To this aim, envelope tracking, outphasing, and the recently introduced load-modulated balanced amplifier provide possible benefits with such signals. In this talk, amplifier topologies and digital solutions are compared theoretically and experimentally by using NI hardware and software platforms. | 12.20 - 13.20 | Rudy´s BBQ Lunch | 13.20 - 15.20 | NI Campus, 5G Lab, and IoT Lab Tour | 15.20 - 15.40 | Coffee Break: Pastry Selection | 15.40 - 16.40 | My Ten Favorite USRP Experiments and Implementation of Overlay Cognitive Radios Murat Torlak - UT Dallas The first part of this talk will present ten labs that I use in my wireless communications laboratory class. The experiments are set up such a way that the student is able to build fully functional sniffer for WiFi 802.11g networks. In the second part, the talk will cover a cognitive radio demonstrator that combines spectrum sensing and overlay cognitive radio communications. In overlay CR systems, transmit waveforms can be designed either in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing or in multicarrier code division multiple access modulation formats by deactivating subcarriers corresponding to primary users' frequency bands to avoid interference. We use USRP experiments to show that our proposed receiver is sufficiently robust to function even in the presence of multiuser interference from multiple SUs. |
Wednesday, July 17th08.30 - 09.00 | Breakfast | 09.00 - 10.00 | Keynote: Evolving 5G and the Challenges Ahead - 5G 2.0 James Kimery - National Instruments 5G is rapidly moving into deployment, but that doesn't mean that 5G research is done. There are a number of different application areas with ongoing research that will impact 5G and beyond. This session aims to provide an overview of 3GPP's timeline for the next set of standards releases and look at some of the different applications that are shaping advanced wireless research today. | 10.10 - 11.10 | Software Defined Radio Adaptive Arrays Payam Nayeri - Colorado School of Mines Digital beamforming (DBF) is the platform for smart antenna technology, and with the rapid growth of our wireless infrastructure, DBF is considered a major necessity for 5G and beyond. Adaptive algorithms coupled with these arrays enable automatic rejection of interference and can maximize the communication throughput in any dynamic environment. In general, the challenge is that hardware implementation is very high cost, and as a result, very few practical implementations of digital beamformers have been reported. We propose an implementation of DBF arrays using software defined radios (SDRs). The SDR platform is a versatile, low-cost solution to DBF and at the same time provides a practical testbed for rapid testing of different beamforming algorithms. In this talk, we outline the process of hardware implementation, synchronization, and calibration of our in-house, low-cost, digital beamformer that uses an array of NI USRP SDRs, and then present experimental results for DBF using classic techniques such as LMS, RLS, and SMI. We then extend this discussion to high-interference scenarios and show that classical approaches to DBF often cannot distinguish between the intended signal and interferences, disrupting the intended operation. We then present a novel beamforming methodology based on evolutionary search techniques that is capable of adaptive interference cancellation in high-interference environments. We present experimental results on the performance of our proposed technique using our in-house developed digital beamformer and show that our system is capable of complete interference cancellation in several high interference scenarios. | 11.20 - 12.20 | 360◦ and 4K Video Streaming for Mobile Devices Dr. Lili Qiu - UT Austin The popularity of 360◦ and/or 4K videos has grown rapidly due to the immersive user experience. 360◦ videos are displayed as a panorama and the view automatically adapts with the head movement. Existing systems stream 360◦ videos in a similar way as regular videos, where all data of the panoramic view is transmitted. This is wasteful since a user only views a small portion of the 360◦ views. To save bandwidth, recent works propose the tile-based streaming, which divides the panoramic view to multiple smaller sized tiles and streams only the tiles within a user’s field of view (FoV) predicted based on the recent head position. Interestingly, tile-based streaming has only been simulated or implemented on desktops. We find that it cannot run in real-time even on the latest smartphone (e.g., Samsung S7, Samsung S8 and Huawei Mate 9) due to hardware and software limitations. Moreover, it results in significant video quality degradation due to head movement prediction error, which is hard to avoid. Motivated by these observations, we develop a novel tile-based layered approach to stream 360◦ content on smartphones to avoid bandwidth wastage while maintaining high video quality.
Next, we explore the feasibility of supporting live 4K video streaming over wireless networks using commodity devices. Coding and streaming live 4K videos incur a prohibitive cost to the network and end system. We propose a novel system, which consists of (i) easy-to-compute layered video coding to seamlessly adapt to unpredictable wireless link fluctuations, (ii) efficient GPU implementation of video coding on commodity devices, and (iii) effectively leveraging both WiFi and WiGig through delayed video adaptation and smart scheduling. Using real experiments and emulation, we demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our system.
| 12.20 - 13.20 | Deli Lunch | 13.20 - 14.20 | Universal Software Defined Radio Open Platform: 5G, 4G, WiFi, and Advanced Research Brian Kelley - UTSA his talk describes a Universal Software Defined Radio Open Platform capable of reconfiguration in real-time and support for all major wireless access technologies. This includes all smart antenna modes of 5G (5G-NR sub-6 GHz), its predecessor 4G (3GPP-LTE), and WiFi (IEEE 802.11ac). The platform can support 5G millimeter wave modes based upon OFDM as well. The reconfigurable research platform, the Universal SDR Open Platform, enables researchers to rapidly pursue new investigations into advanced research areas. | 14.30 - 15.30 | Deep Learning-Based Security Solutions for the Internet of Medical Things Dr. Heena Rathore - Hiller Measurements Intelligent healthcare has gained importance in the recent past since it allows continuous, remote monitoring of patients away from hospitals and doctors. With advances in technology, doctors now can improve the quality of medical service for their patients through a surgical methodology that includes implantable embedded medical devices. Addition of connectivity to such devices is the key enabling technology. Devices are now connected to each other and to the world wide web (internet), which leads to the use of the term Internet of Medical Things. To enable this, medical devices now have WiFi/Cellular chips on them so that they can talk to each other, in addition to the traditional roles of sensing and actuating. However, on the other end, the addition of connectivity and computing platform now makes these devices more prone to hacking. This talk focuses on how deep learning techniques can be utilized to make these devices secure. This talk covers different problems of security ranging between internal to communication attacks such as authentication, classification, prediction on implantable medical devices such as insulin pump implants, deep brain stimulators, and cardiac defibrillator. The talk will cover efficient techniques, such as multi-layer perceptron neural networks, recurrent neural networks, etc. to overcome these problems. This talk also discusses how these algorithms can be implemented on the node or on the edge to enable real-time decision making. After this lecture, the audience will be able to apply deep learning techniques to make medical devices secure from unauthorized access. They will learn the tools to compare different types of techniques and also a working understanding of how to implement such algorithms on embedded processors. | 15.30 - 15.50 | Coffee Break: Round Rock Donuts | 15.50 - 16.50 | Student-Led Lightning Talks 3:50 - 4:10: Waqar Saadat 4:10 - 4:30: Carmen D'Andrea 4:30 - 4:50: Adil Abbas | 17.00 - 19.00 | Networking Event at TopGolf Shuttle Service from NI |
Thursday, July 18th08.30 - 09.00 | Einstein Bros. Bagels Breakfast | 09.00 - 10.00 | Keynote: Unlocking efficiencies in supply chain & distribution using Industrial IoT N.R. Vijay - Prolifics In an integrated world, retailers looking to serve eCommerce consumers have to deal with high expectations - “Free one-day shipping”, high-quality products delivered at low cost while keeping the consumers updated on order status. Mastery of supply chain and distribution translates to maximum market share and associated margins. Hence, it is necessary for retailers to source high-quality products from low-cost places anywhere in the world. It’s also critical to ensure product quality along the supply chain. Onshore, optimizing last mile delivery is a key differentiator. Industrial IoT promises to unlock efficiencies in both supply chain and last mile delivery. | 10.10 - 11.10 | AI and Machine Learning in PHY Layer Design Tim O'Shea - DeepSig Machine learning has recently seen a number of enormous advances in both computational, algorithmic, and data-driven capabilities. Over the past few years, dramatic breakthroughs have been realized in computer vision, natural language processing, and a wide range of other applications. This data-driven approach promises as well to drastically transform how we do wireless signal processing in the physical layer, scaling systems from idealized analytic models to incredibly detailed complex data-driven models which work better in the real world, and driving down computational complexity by moving to highly concurrent and compact inference engines. This talk will discuss the key trends and enablers for deep learning and data-driven system design, and then it will deep dive into several key applications within wireless physical layer sensing and communications system design, detailing how these approaches can be leveraged and applied, and illustrating key recent works and results which highlight performance advantages of leveraging data-driven signal processing and neural network style inference engines for a range of tasks where they can outperform traditional idealized analytic models. | 11.20 - 12.20 | Using FPGAs and SDRs to create real-time testbeds Sarah Yost - National Instruments In today's wireless communications world, being able to create real-time testbeds to prototype new ideas and algorithms is a critical step in advancing new technologies. The newest communications standards have even tighter timing constraints and larger bandwidths than previous generations and host-based processing no longer sufficient to create prototypes that need a real-time physical layer. This session will dive into some of the hardware and software tools that are available to create testbeds as well as discuss some examples of successful testbeds. | 12.20 - 14.00 | Lunch at Gloria´s - The Domain | 14.00 - 17.30 | Open Source SDR hands On With GNU Radio Neel Pandeya - Ettus Research In this hands-on, you will get an introduction to commercial software-defined radios from Ettus Research / National Instruments and learn the basics of using GNU Radio as a development tool with the NI-USRP x310. GNU Radio is an open-source free software tool built by a community of developers. |
Friday, July 19th08.30 - 09.00 | | 09.00 - 10.00 | Keynote: Collaborative IoT, 5G and AI empower building smart solutions towards Smart Cities Fawzi Behmann - The emergence of autonomous driving is bringing communication and mobility closer together. Health and wellness are moving from clinical settings into homes, cars, and other places. As the boundaries between these areas continue to be traversed, the value of data is bringing the need for near-ubiquitous sensing, data collection, and artificial intelligence—in the cloud and at the edge—into virtually every area of our customers’ lives. The IoT is trying to solve problems across those segments, and that is driving a change in how players in the IoT space need to think and operate. Sensing is becoming increasingly multimodal and media-driven. Real-time insights are required to support decision-control loops that operate in microsecond to millisecond timescales for mission-critical industrial control and processing. Edge intelligence and low-latency quality of service will support the next generation of immersive user experiences. This summit will also discuss how moving computation to the edge helps to increase data privacy & security for user/enterprise and diverse geographies. The ushering of powerful communication standards such as 5G not only delivers the speed, mass connectivity and real-time – low latency mission-critical applications. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), real-time data-analytics can be performed on the data to provide predictive and preventive analytics for smart connected things in the connected world The talk will focus on three principal applications/use cases.
Namely, Smart Healthcare, Smart Mobility, and Autonomous Vehicles, and Smart Cities. | 10.10 - 12.10 | Student-Led Lightning Talks 10:10 - 10:30: Vanya Cherneva 10:30 - 10:50: Abubakr Alabasi 10:50 - 11:10: Mohamed Aref 11:10 - 11:30: Luis Oquendo 11:30 - 11:50: George O'Mahony | 12.10 - 12.40 | Recap, Questions and Slip Time | 13.00 - 14.00 | Lunch |
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