IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks
12-14 November 2019 // Dallas, Texas, USA

Panels

Panel #1: Algorithmic and Data Aspects of NFV-SDN

Date: November 13th 

Time: 15:00-16:15

Moderator: Sandra Scott-Hayward

Panelists: Nate Foster, Brian Kelley, Levi Perigo

Abstract:

NFV and SDN technologies enable new data and algorithmic approaches to be applied to the deployment and operations of telecommunications networks. For example, routing and switching resources can be dynamically reconfigured based on adaptive algorithms. These algorithms can take into account many different metrics, such as availability of infrastructure, security and privacy, bandwidth pricing, and carbon footprint, latency, or resilience.

Besides, NFV & SDN technologies enable new kinds of network monitoring and surveillance techniques to predict and rapidly adapt to network events such as congestion, route & node failures and of course, to detect and isolate security threats.

Panelists are invited to outline their views on the opportunity and impact of new algorithmic and data-driven capabilities, enabled by NFV and SDN, together with the steps they think the industry needs to take to realize the opportunities fully.

CV of Moderator:

Dr. Sandra Scott-Hayward received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Queen’s University Belfast, U.K., in 2009 and 2013, respectively, where she is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) with the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies. She began her career in industry, and became a Chartered Engineer in 2006, having worked as a Systems Engineer and Engineering Group Leader with Airbus. She has published a series of IEEE papers on performance and security designs for software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), and co-edited the book entitled Guide to Security in SDN and NFV—Challenges, Opportunities, and Applications (Springer, 2017). Her research interests include the development of network security architectures and security functions for SDNs and NFV. She was a recipient of the Outstanding Technical Contributor and Outstanding Leadership Awards from the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) in 2015 and 2016, respectively. She has served on the TPC of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. She was elected and served as the Vice-Chair of ONF Security Working Group from 2015 to 2017.

CV of Panelists:

Nate Foster is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Principal Research Engineer at Barefoot Networks. The goal of his research is to develop tools that make it easy for programmers to build secure and reliable systems. His current work focuses on the design and implementation of languages for programming software-defined networks. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, and a BA in Computer Science from Williams College. His honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, and several best paper and teaching awards.

 

Dr. Kelley received his BSEE from Cornell University’s College of Electrical Engineering in Ithaca NY where he graduated Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. He received his MSEE and PhDEE from Georgia Tech in 1992 where he was an Office of Naval Research Fellow and a Georgia Tech Presidential Fellow with a research focus on communications, Signal Processing, and high performance computing architectures.  He spent 10+ years in industry with both Motorola and Motorola’s spinoff, Freescale.  While there, he rose to Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, developing Wi-Fi, HSPA, LTE communication radio simulators, and served as a representative to the 3GPP RAN4 (4G-LTE) standards body. Since 2007, Dr. Kelley has been an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). At UTSA, Dr. Kelley is Director of the Wireless Information and Next Generation Systems Laboratory (WINGS) with an emphasis on 5G Communications, Software Defined Radio (SDR), Cloud Radio Access Network (CRAN), IoT, Physical Layer Security, and Quantum Information Systems. Dr. Kelley has received over $2.6M in research funding from ONR, AFRL TECHLAV, DoE and consults extensively with cellular communications companies. He has numerous IEEE publications and holds 11 US patents. Dr. Kelley has been an IEEE 4G Technical Workshop Organizer, has served on the Technical Program Committee for IEEE Globecom, currently Chairs the IEEE Chapter of Communications and Signal Processing of San Antonio, and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE System Journal. From 2015-2016, Dr. Kelley was Sabbatical Employee of the Department of Defense in Washington D.C.  In 2015 and 2017 he was a Summer Faculty Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the Quantum Information System Group. At UTSA, Dr. Kelley instructs courses on 5G-New Radio Communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Radio (SDR), Error Correction Codes, and Statistics, Random Signals and Noise.

 

Dr. Levi Perigo is a Scholar in Residence in the Computer Science graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Prior to joining the University of Colorado full-time, Dr. Perigo was a Senior Network Engineer at ADTRAN Inc.  In this role, he served as an escalation point for isolation and resolution of heterogeneous internetworking problems for major accounts.  He holds vendor certifications in networking technologies in areas such as software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP routing, switching, network design, wireless technologies, Voice over IP (VoIP), and Internet of Things (IoT) home integration.   Previously, as a Research Associate for the Open Networking Foundation, Dr. Perigo contributed to the creation and advancement of SDN and the OpenFlow standard, and now he currently holds a position on the MEF Research Council where he contributes with his expertise in SDN/NFV. His ongoing research interests are in a variety of internetworking technologies such as network automation, SDN/NFV, and next generation protocols.

 

Panel #2: System and Performance Aspects of NFV-SDN

Date: November 14th 

Time: 15:00-16:15

Moderator: Don Clarke

Panelists: Ying Zhang, Andrea Fumagalli, Sridhar Rajagopal

Abstract:

NFV and SDN technologies present significant opportunities but also new operational challenges for network operators. The difficulties of specifying and integrating these new systems were foreseen but have not yet been fully solved. As a minimum, NFV implementation and operations need to deliver the deterministic performance, security, and reliability that differentiates telecommunications networks from other types of networks, even as technologies and markets change, and regulations evolve in different jurisdictions.

The long term persistence of telecommunications networks as critical national infrastructures means that organizational change is necessarily incremental. New skills need to be acquired and need to coexist with existing ones as operators evolve to accommodate these new technologies alongside the existing networks. Hence, it is likely to take several more years for NFV to reach maturity because of the critical nature and sheer scale and complexity of the industry.

We invite our panelists to highlight areas in systems and performance that they think are the most important to address in the short term, their benefits, and what actions are needed. We also invite panelists to outline how they think network operators and their industry partners can smoothly evolve their operations to make the best use of these technologies.

CV of Moderator:

Don Clarke is an independent consultant specializing in telecommunications technology and business strategy.

Prior to moving to the United States in 2014 to join CableLabs where he led the collaborative effort to develop a cloud networking strategy for the global cable industry, he had a long and varied career as an R&D group leader at BT Laboratories in the UK.

At BT he initiated and led the global Telecom industry NFV collaboration and was editor of the joint-carrier paper published in October 2012 signed by 13 global carriers which coined the term “Network Function Virtualization (NFV)” and outlined the industry vision. This paper is widely regarded as the seminal document heralding cloud networking as the future direction for telecommunications networks. He led the operator group which founded the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group and he chaired the Network Operator Council until November 2018.

In 2014 he co-founded Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), the leading open source NFV integration project.

In previous roles at BT Labs Don was a member of the task force awarded the British Telecommunications Gold Medal for their contribution to achievement of 100% broadband coverage in the UK and he led the team awarded the 1998 UK National Physical Laboratory prize for BT’s pioneering work on measuring high frequency cross-talk in the live UK telephony network. The first international team to do so.

In his spare time, he founded and ran a video display technology manufacturing company in the UK for many years.

Don holds a BSc. in Computer Systems from the University of Essex in the UK, and is registered in the UK as a Chartered Engineer. He has authored 9 patents on Passive Optical Networks and several are pending on NFV Security. He has authored numerous papers over the course of his telecommunications R&D career.

 

CV of Panelists:

Ying Zhang is Software Engineering Manager in Facebook. She works on large scale network management problems and her research interests are in Software-Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, network monitoring, Internet routing, and network security. She has 30+ granted US/International patents, 50 peer-reviewed publications with about 1500 citations, and she was named by Swedish media as Mobile Network 10 Brightest Researcher. She was awarded as a Rising Star in the Networking and Communications area.

 

Andrea Fumagalli is a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino. From 1992 to 1998 he was an Assistant Professor at the Electronics Engineering Department of Politecnico di Torino. He served as Program Head of the Telecommunications Engineering program at UT-Dallas from 2007 to 2012.

Dr. Fumagalli’s research interests include aspects of mobile and optical networks, related protocol design and performance evaluation. He has published more than two hundred papers in refereed journals and conferences. Dr. Fumagalli has made multiple earlier contributions to the area of high speed and optical network architectures, including protocol design, performance evaluation, and packet switching. He has been involved in a number of research projects focusing on packet switched optical networks sponsored by NSF and ARPA, and collaborated with leading network equipment suppliers and operators.

Sridhar Rajagopal is a Vice President at Mavenir Systems, where he heads the system design for Mavenir’s virtualized cloud RAN products for LTE and 5G. Prior to this, he was VP, system engineering as one of the initial employees at Ranzure Networks, a cloud RAN start-up. He also had R&D roles in design, prototyping and standardization of 5G cellular and Wi-Fi systems at Samsung, in UWB technology at WiQuest communications and 3G/4G research at Nokia. He was an associate editor for the Journal of Signal Processing Systems (Springer) and has held leadership positions in standardization bodies such as IEEE and WiMedia.  He was a co-recipient of the IEEE 2017 Marconi Prize Paper award for his research on mmWave systems. He has co-invented around 43 issued US patents. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University and is a senior member of IEEE.