As an expert on design and deployment of diverse Green wireless communication systems Dr. Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir is currently working at Wireless Research Lab, Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), Doha, Qatar. He is also interested in deriving emerging wireless architectures and application oriented unified frameworks for machine type communications, cognitive radio communications and ubiquitous remote/mobile healthcare communications. He is optimistic about further evolution of Cognitive radio technology with the future wireless networks where the cognition in wireless communications will be an essential feature of fifth-generation (5G) systems.
Dr. Shakir will be the Technical Program Chair of the International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks (CROWNCOM 2015) – to take place on April 21-23 in Doha – together with Dr. Mohamed Adballah from Texas A&M University at Qatar and Dr. George Karagiannidis from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and Khalifa University, UAE. Dr. Shakir shares with EAI his opinions on the 10th edition CROWNCOM and talks about the biggest challenge within the research field.
What topics will CROWNCOM 2015 focus on and how does this selection reflect the status quo of research within the field of cognitive radio oriented wireless networks?
2015 marks the 10th anniversary of CROWNCOM. The event will be a special occasion to look back at the contributions of CROWNCOM toward the advancements of cognitive radio technology since its inaugural conference in Mykonos, Greece, in 2006 as well as to look forward to the decades ahead, the ways that cognitive radio technology would like to evolve and the ways its emerging applications and services can ensure everyone is connected everywhere.
Evolution of cognitive radio technology pertaining to 5G networks is the theme of 2015 edition of CROWNCOM in which cognition and self-organization in the network are now considered as striking solutions for future spectra demands. Advances in this technology could provide potential solutions to cellular traffic congestion problems by exploiting new and underutilized spectral resources. Moreover, as we know that growth in Machine Type Communications and Internet of Everything represents an emerging use of limited spectra. Therefore, we now believe that 5G networks are essentially required to facilitate the heterogeneous demands of users in heterogeneous-type environments via emerging 5G disruptive technologies.
What do you personally expect to be the highlights of the conference?
CROWNCOM 2015 will feature a comprehensive technical program, including 13 technical sessions on state-of-the-art and emerging cognitive radio frameworks and three tutorials by expert researchers on the emerging hot topic on 5G wireless networks. We thank our generous co-sponsor Qatar, National Research Fund (QNRF), for their instrumental support in organizing this conference and inviting expert researchers from around the world.
This year CROWNCOM will feature six keynote speeches from distinguished speakers: Prof. Leandros Tassiulas form Yale University (USA), Dr. Ali Sadri from Intel Corp. (USA), Prof. Mohamed-Slim Alouini from KAUST (Saudi Arabia), Prof. Halim Yanikomeroglu from Carlton University (Canada), Dr. George Chrisikos from Qualcomm Inc. (USA) and Prof. Hesham Al-Gamal from Ohio State University (USA). CROWNCOM 2015 will also feature industrial presence to discuss the regulatory and policy issues for the next generation of cognitive radio networks. There are two sets of panels, which will be steered by Dr. Maziar Nekovee from Samsung UK. Panels will have balanced representation from industry and academia, such as Ericsson Sweden, Intel Germany, Huawei Germany, CEA-LETI France, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar, Memorial University, Canada and Qatar Mobility Innovations Center, Qatar. A special workshop has been organized on cognitive radio for 5G networks. The workshop will feature invited papers from expert researchers, a keynote speech by Dr. Octavia Dobre from Memorial University, Canada and excellent technical regular papers.
Like all EAI conferences, CROWNCOM 2015 will strive to bring researchers and practitioners together and help them collaborate. Why is this important? What is the situation within your field like in this regard?
The technical program of CROWNCOM 2015 has been organized to bring academic and industrial researchers together to identify and discuss the recent developments, highlight the challenging gaps and forecast the future trends of cognitive radio technology toward its integration with the 5G network deployment. We strongly advocate that the research community, practitioners, standardization bodies and developers should collaborate on their research efforts to further align the development initiatives toward the evolution of emerging highly dynamic spectrum access frameworks. The biggest challenge here is to design unified cross-layer new network architectures for successful aggregation of highly distributed chunks of spectra (from unseen spectra to visible light spectra), addressing the spectrum scarcity problem for ubiquitous connectivity and preparing the ground for “The Age of the ZetaByte.”
