Events
Optical Networking an Enabler for 5G and Beyond
26 May 2021
Eastern Time (US & Canada) (UTC -05:00)
Digital technologies have been identified as key in addressing fundamental challenges associated with societal and economic objectives, such as improved quality of living for citizens, sustainable development and economic growth. In this context, 5G infrastructures will play a fundamental role in bringing these technologies to society transforming their every day’s life in the way services are provided, and businesses are run. However, this transformation requires new service capabilities that network operators need to support including: i) connectivity for a growing number of very diverse devices, ii) ubiquitous access with varying degrees of mobility in heterogeneous environments and, iii) mission critical services, supporting highly variable performance attributes in a cost and energy-efficient manner. These demanding and diverse requirements bring the need of a paradigm shift migrating from closed purposely developed infrastructures into open elastic ecosystems able to support a variety of very diverse services and end-users. These ecosystems will rely on flexible architectural models adopting convergence and integration of a variety of network and compute technologies, network softwarisation, hardware programmability and disaggregation of compute/storage and network resources. In this context, the webinar will focus on describing the relevant ecosystem and the key role that advanced optical networking solutions can play in the 5G era and beyond. Performance evaluation results as well as relevant demonstration activities will be also discussed.
About Our Speaker: Anna Tzanakaki, University of Athens
Anna Tzanakaki is an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the Athens Information Technology (AIT), Greece where she was leading the Network Design and Services research group. She has been also an adjunct faculty member of the Information Networking Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She was a co-founder of ilotron ltd, a high-technology spin-off from the University of Essex. Following ilotron, Dr Tzanakaki joined Altamar Networks, a subsidiary of Ditech Communications, as a principal engineer responsible for optical architecture and system design. She is a co-author of over 200 publications in international journals and conferences. She is a co-inventor of several granted and published patents. She is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of several Technical Program Committees of international scientific conferences. She has served as an associate editor of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networks and is a technical referee for various conferences as well as international scientific journals. She serves and has served as a technical expert for the EU, the national research councils of Greece, UK and Portugal. She has actively participated in a number of European and national funded research collaborative projects and is the technical coordinator of the EU 5G PPP project 5G-VICTORI. Her research interests include converged systems and networks.
