Dr. Vincenzo Mancuso, Research Assistant Professor at IMDEA Networks, gave the talk "Advanced Technologies for Extremely Dense and Heterogeneous Wireless Networks” at a workshop organized by Telecom Italia in Turin (Italy), held from November 12th to the 14th. Under the name of “Advanced Small Cell Deployments and Cloud Technologies for Next Generation Mobile Networks”, the event was structured around two main topics. On the one hand, it analysed the impact of advanced network architectures on the design of small cells. On the other hand, it studied the role that European funded projects shall have in future global standards. In this context, the talk given by Dr. Mancuso dwelt on the objectives of the European project CROWD*, of which he is Technical Manager. The technology developed by this project – operating from January 2013 for a period of 30 months - will be designed taking into account the requirements for commercial deployment. Exploitation plans comprise a thorough roadmap for standardization.
CROWD was launched with the objective of tackling the exponential growth of wireless traffic demand. This growing demand can only be satisfied by increasing the density of points of access and combining different wireless technologies. Mobile network operators have already started to push for denser, heterogeneous deployments; however, current technology needs to steer towards efficiency, to avoid unsustainable energy consumption and network performance implosion due to interference. While some efforts have already been devoted to evolving the technology, these efforts mostly take a restricted PHY perspective and do not consider higher-layer mechanisms, which are required to fully optimise global performance. In this context, CROWD promotes a paradigm shift in the future Internet architecture towards global network cooperation, dynamic network functionality configuration and fine, on demand, capacity tuning. The project targets very dense heterogeneous wireless access networks and integrated wireless-wired backhaul networks.
* Connectivity management for eneRgy Optimised Wireless Dense networks