Conference Report : ConTEL 2015

This is an experience report of presenting a paper and attending the ConTEL 2015 conference.

The 13th Conference on Telecommunications was co-organized by Graz University of Technology and University of Zagreb at Graz in Austria. This edition of the conference focused primarily on Optical Communications and Near Field Communications. The conference was organized for two and half days and saw about 45 papers being presented.

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The keynote talk on day one was give by Dr. Peter J. Winzer on “Overcoming the Optical Networks capacity crunch“. The talk was very well structured where the speaker started by showing the expected capacity crunch the industry faces due to the boom in the content creation and sharing. The current limit being reached through fundamental approach (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) through Shannon’s Theory was used as base to support the exploration of other physical dimension such as space. The talk closed by highlighting the areas such as Space Division Multiplexing as a potential area for future research for both academia and industry. There were two tracks following the keynote which focused on Free Space Optics and Optical Communications. The papers focused on using the visible light as a medium to transmit data and challenges associated with it. A team from German Aerospace Center presented a paper on the testbed built for an optical feeder with a terabit throughput using the Geostationary satellites.

The second day keynote talk was given by Dr. Michael Gebhart on “Discovering the NFC Air Interface“. The talk focused on the early days of the technology being confined to the academic papers and which was only made commercial in the last few years. The speaker talked about the different types of NFC applications such as contactless card, NFC strips, NFC machines and NFC enabled mobiles. The talk also delved into the challenges faced in terms of signal distortion between the components and how various new antenna designs are being created to tackle the problem. The rest of the tracks over the day featured papers which focused on antenna design and data modulation w.r.t NFC.

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On the third day, a paper on Cyclops was presented to the audience. The paper focused on the research challenges that the rating, charging & billing framework would be tackling and the need for a generic framework in the present cloud ecosystem. The architecture and different services were explained along with a use case where cyclops is being implemented in T-Nova, as part of billing support for NFV marketplace. The presentation slides can be accessed here.

Participants had numerous social events in the evening planned by the conference organizers where the attendees were invited for dinner Mayor of Graz on day one and by the governor of Steiermark on day two. Overall, even though there weren’t many interesting papers on cloud computing per se, it was a good experience to know about the latest developments happening in the telecommunication world.

 

 


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