The transition from 4G to 5G for wireless is about more than simply increasing performance and bandwidth over the radio link, although improvements in these areas will be an important driver. The industry vision for 5G includes improvements in deployment models within the backhaul and core network to make network management more flexible, enable new business models and efficiently support massive scale for connection of end devices (e.g. IoT) as well as secure, high reliability applications such as connected vehicles and healthcare. Hence NFV and SDN are key enabling technologies in the 5G network transition. In this panel session, panelists will present their views and engage in a discussion about the role NFV and SDN play in the 5G network transformation.
Moderator
Tetsuya Nakamura
Tetsuya Nakamura serves as Principal Architect, Strategy and Innovation Group at CableLabs. Tetsuya is leading CableLabs’ open source research efforts on NFV and SDN, the Board member of OPNFV, and OpenDaylight Advisory Group. Before joining CableLabs, Tetsuya worked at NTT for about 17 years. While at NTT DOCOMO, Tetsuya was in charge of NFV investigation for mobile networks, and actively involved in the ETSI NFV ISG as ISG Vice Chair, Vice Chair of Technical Steering Committee, and Chair of Software Architecture WG. Also, he was a founder of OPNFV and the initial Board member for NTT DOCOMO.
Panelists
Ulas Kozat
Ulas Kozat is a senior member of technical staff at Huawei R&D in Santa Clara, CA. At Huawei, he leads several R&D and open source projects in the areas of Software Defined Mobile Networks and Network Function Virtualization. He serves as the PTL of OPNFV Domino Project. Previously, he has worked as principal research scientist at Argela USA in Sunnyvale, CA and as principal research engineer at DOCOMO Innovations (formerly DOCOMO USA Labs) in Palo Alto, CA. Ulas Kozat received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA; M.Sc. from the George Washington University, Washington DC, USA; and B.Sc. from the Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey all in Electrical & Electronics Engineering. Dr. Kozat has published extensively (https://sites.google.com/site/ulaskozat/home/publications) and holds several patents (https://sites.google.com/site/ulaskozat/home/patents) in the areas of network modeling; cross-layer optimization; and architecture, protocol, algorithm design. He is co-recipient of the best paper awards in IEEE ICC-2011 and ACM VISA-2010 conferences. He has served in the organization and technical programming committees of various prestigious venues including IEEE NFV-SDN, IEEE Infocom, IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom, IEEE PIMRC, ACM Mobicom, ACM Mobisys, ACM ATC. He is a senior member of IEEE.
Katia Obraczka
Katia Obraczka is a Professor of Computer Engineering with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Her research interests span the areas of computer networks, distributed systems, and Internet information systems. Her laboratory, the Internetwork Research Group, UCSC, conducts research on designing and developing protocol architectures motivated by the Internets of the future. She has been a PI and a co-PI in a number of projects sponsored by government agencies, such as NSF, DARPA, NASA, ARO, DoE, and AFOSR, as well as in industry, such as Cisco, Google, and Nokia. She is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Anit Lohtia
Anit Lohtia, VP Advanced Technologies, leads SDN/NFV strategy at Tech Mahindra. His focus is on the transformation of legacy networks for cloud and virtualization. A 20-year veteran of the wireless industry, he has held various leadership roles in R&D, product management, business strategy and global business development. He has been instrumental in driving evolution of the mobile industry from 2G to 3G and 4G in his previous leadership roles with AT&T, Nortel and Ericsson. Anit holds many patents in the field of mobile wireless data. He has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and MBA in corporate finance.
Brian Skerry
Brian is a Principal Engineer within Intel’s Network Platforms Group working on a number of SDN and NFV initiatives. He has been the lead architect on an open source reference platform for NFV within Intel targeted for telco and data center use cases. His focus for the past few years has been on using server platform technologies to achieve the NFV vision, and has worked with various industry partners and service providers on developing proof of concept systems. Previously Brian has been the lead SW architect for a number of platforms targeted at the communications industry, and currently is Intel’s representative on the OPNFV Technical Steering Committee.