AI and Open Source vs. 6G Standardisation and Regulation: Can there Be Chaos in Order?
Thursday, 6 June 2024, 11:00-12:30, Darwin Hall
Organizer
- Ove Edfors (Univ. Lund, SE)
Motivation and Background
The blessing of global wireless standards. Arriving for the first time in a country, we naturally expect to be able to connect to a local mobile network. We take this for granted today, thanks to the success of global standardization. Not only do these standards serve users with seamless roaming, they also open up a broad market potential for equipment vendors, facilitate multi-vendors cooperations for network operators, and have provided clear specifications for test and measurement to ensure compliance of equipment and deployments.
Holy grail or straitjacket? Logically, for the R&D community working on novel wireless technologies, the eventual adoption of these technologies in standards has become the holy grail. However, it is clear that many valuable ideas never arrive at that point. Standards inevitably fix transmission schemes that may be very good for some scenarios and services yet less so in other situations, or make a compromise between backward compatibility and technological progress. The ‘definition’ of a standard to some extent also creates a straitjacket for innovation.
What could (not) be different for 6G and future wireless systems? Two evolutions that have gained great momentum in recent years raise the question whether future wireless standards should be defined as has been done for previous generations: the advent of AI and of open source in software and hardware. It has been stated that 6G should, could, or will have ‘native AI’ capabilities, which has ambitiously been clarified as ‘Its air interface and network designs will leverage E2E AI and machine learning to implement customized optimization and automated operations.’ Technically it I expected that both the usage of the Is this a desirable goal, from a technical, business, and legal standpoint? Could open source play a facilitating and democratizing role in this trend?
Questions
- Should future wireless standards for 6G and next generation WiFi follow the conventional standardization approach, or should there be more room for some chaos in the order?
- Which role do you see for AI in wireless standards: is this opening a pandora’s box? From processing signals to determining how we send signals? From machine learning to machine reasoning?
- Is open source an opportunity for creative entrepreneurs or a treat for our industry, or both or none?
- Could far-reaching open source solutions and/or AI in wireless networks be at the benefit of the end-users?
Participants
The panel is composed of (see CVs below):
- Chair: Ove Edfors, (Lund Univ., SE) (moderator)
- Erik Dahlman (Ericsson Research, SE)
- Daniel Verenzuela (Sony Europe, DE)
- Sofie Pollin (KU Leuven, BE)
- Amir Aminifar (Lund Univ., SE)
- Emine Ozge Yildirim (KU Leuven Centre for IT and IP Law, BE)
Ove Edfors
Ove Edfors is Professor of Radio Systems at Lund University, Sweden. His primary research interests include statistical signal processing and system design, applied to wireless communication systems. His current research focus is on design and implementation of massive MIMO systems and large intelligent surfaces, including all aspects from design of distributed algorithms and synchronization methods to their implementation in digital hardware. One of the important tools in the research is real-time testbeds, where performance can be verified all the way to realistic conditions. He has taken an active active part in developing the world-first real-time 100-antenna massive MIMO testbed at Lund University. Partly in collaboration with researchers at University of Bristol, he and his colleagues at Lund University performed the first real-world tests of massive MIMO and showed its potential to massively increase spectral efficiency, demonstrating 145.6 bps/Hz. He is currently working on a modular real-time testbed for large intelligent surfaces, an extreme form of distributed massive MIMO targeting 1024 coherently operating transcievers.
Ove Edfors received his PhD in Signal Processing from Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, in 1996 and became professor of radio systems at Lund University, Sweden, in 2002.
Erik Dahlman
Erik Dahlman is currently Senior Expert in Radio Access Technologies within Ericsson Research. He has been involved in the development of wireless-access technologies from early 3G via 4G LTE to 5G NR and its evolution. He is currently focusing on future wireless-access technologies, including the more long-term 5G evolution and technologies applicable 6G wireless access. He is the co-author of multiple books on wireless communication, including 4G – LTE and LTE-Advanced for mobile broadband, 4G – LTE-Advanced Pro and The Road to 5G and, most recently, 5G NR – The Next Generation Wireless Access Technology. In 2022 he was awarded the Ericsson Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to wireless communication. He has a PhD in Telecommunication from the Royal Institute of Technology.
Daniel Verenzuela
Dr. Daniel Verenzuela is Senior Research Engineer at Sony Europe. In this role he has been working on WLAN standardization since 2020. He is a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 working group contributing to the development of 802.11be (EHT) and 802.11bn (UHR) standard amendments. He received his M.Sc. double degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin (PdT), Italy, and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, in 2014 (MERIT scholarship recipient). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Linköping University (LiU), Sweden, in 2020. Prior to that he worked as an RF Engineer for the optimization of 2G and 3G networks. His contributions in 802.11 have been in the area of high reliability and low latency communications for real time application. Furthermore, he has extensive experience in signal processing for Massive MIMO systems with emphasis on spectral and energy efficient design.
Sofie Pollin
Sofie Pollin is professor at KU Leuven focusing on wireless communication systems. Before that, she worked at imec and UC Berkeley, and she is currently still a principal member of technical staff at imec. Her research centers around wireless networks that require networks that are ever more dense, heterogeneous, battery powered, and spectrum constrained. Her research interests are cell-free networks, integrated communication and sensing, and non-terrestrial networks.
Amir Aminifar
Amir Aminifar is Associate Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Information Technology at Lund University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Swedish National Computer Science Graduate School (CUGS), Linköping University, Sweden, in 2016. During 2016-2020, he held a Scientist position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland. His research interests are centered around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Within this domain, he has a history of collaboration with the industry, including General Motors (GM), Texas Instruments (TI), Ericsson Research.
Emine Ozge Yildirim
Emine, an LL.B. graduate from Marmara University, Turkey, and an LL.M. holder from Georgetown University Law Center, specializes in technology policy and freedom of expression. Her career includes internships at the Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge in Washington, DC, focusing on platform liabilities and immunities. She has worked as a legal fellow in the US, contributing to open knowledge advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, and addressing online speech regulation as a visiting scholar at Duke University School of Law. Currently a doctoral researcher at CiTiP, Emine is writing her Ph.D. thesis on ‘Preserving Our Mental Autonomy: Freedom of Thought in the Speech 4.0 Era’, exploring the impact of digitization on governmental propaganda and human rights frameworks. Emine’s research spans digital freedoms, cognitive liberty, open knowledge, and technology philosophy. A committed human rights advocate, she’s also an attorney admitted to the New York State Bar. Emine has been recently recognized in “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” 2024 by Women in AI Ethics.
