Maliha Urooj Jada, a PhD student from the Department of Communications and Networks at Aalto University in Finland, and the winner of the ‘Best Paper’ award at MONAMI 2014, the 6th International Conference on Mobile Networks and Management that took place in Wuerzburg, Germany, talked to us about the field of energy-efficient mobile networks and the contribution her paper on solutions to optimize energy consumption in mobile cellular networks has made to it.
The MONAMI conference aimed to bring together research and industry. How important is it for the academia to find a suitable collaboration model with the industry?
I am doing research in the field of making mobile networks energy efficient – a field that is very popular today. In this field it is very important that industry and academia work in parallel and share the knowledge with effective collaboration so that the desired goal can be achieved in time, and so that the academic side does not waste time working on something that has already been developed by the industry. For example, the mobile network energy models that have been developed by industry are not being shared with the academia, which makes it difficult for researchers to achieve more practical solutions. Rather, researchers have to first develop an energy model themselves or use available sub-optimal models for their proposed energy efficient techniques.
What was your impression of MONAMI 2014? In your opinion, what were the most innovative issues discussed at the conference?
MONAMI 2014 was a small but very informative conference. All the participants were very open in sharing their research ideas. The senior researchers and professors were also motivated for future research collaboration between universities. In respect to my research interests, one of the sessions in MONAMI was very enticing. It was based on energy-aware wireless networking, and discussed the possible and innovative solutions for building energy-efficient mobile networks. Also, the tutorial on SDN (software defined networks) was very informative and useful, especially for those working in this field.
Your paper won the Best Paper Award at MONAMI 2014. What was the main contribution of “A traffic Aware Energy Saving Scheme for Multicarrier HSPA+“ to the field?
With time, the mobile network traffic is increasing drastically. In near future there will be more mobile users, and thus more energy will be required to operate the huge networks. Just to deal with this issue, researchers are proposing energy-efficient ways of operating already existing networks and building new networks. Our work is a contribution towards providing the solution for this very important issue. As network resources are limited, we proposed a scheme in which network resources (frequency carriers) are managed efficiently, follow network traffic dynamics, and maintain the quality of the service, in order to achieve the best possible energy savings, which is one of the most important goals of network operators from an economic and environmental perspective.
