Title: Small Cells Deployment in 4G/5G Wireless Access Networks
Speaker: Professor Jie Zhang, University of Sheffield, UK
Date：9:00 a.m., September 17, 2012 (Monday)
Place：Lecture Room on Fourth Floor

Abstract: 
    Since 2004, the rapid development of smart phones and tablet PCs has promoted the rapid growth of data traffic. It has been predicted that the annual compound growth rate of the data traffic can be up to 60% ~ 100%, and this trend will continue until at least 2020. This implies that the traffic load over wireless networks in 2020 will be 1,000 times of that in 2010, which brings great challenges in mobile application services. To address the challenges, it is critical for service operators to improve the spectrum efficiency and reduce the energy consumption in existing macro-cell wireless networks. 
     This talk will first introduce several approaches for network capacity improvement, including spectrum efficiency maximization, end-to-end communication, etc. Then, more emphasis will be focused on small cell dense deployment, which is one of the most effective approaches to handling the exponential growth of traffic loads. Simulation results will be presented to show the interference in small-cell systems, corresponding outage probability and network capacity, in both indoor and outdoor environments. The talk will also discuss, in order to deploy the small cell system, why we need to redesign the existing radio resource management algorithms, network architectures, etc. Finally, it is pointed out that a combination of optical and wireless networks (cellular and WiFi) will be the most natural way to address the challenges of data traffic growth, and more than 90% 4G/5G networks will be based on a “ FTTx+radio head” architecture.

The Biography：

    JIE ZHANG is currently a professor in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK. He received his M. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Automatic Control and Electronic Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in University College London (UCL) and Oxford University in UK from 1997 to 2001. Prof. Zhang is now a “Thousand Talents Program” expert.

    Research interests of Prof. Zhang focus on wireless communication network optimization, including indoor/outdoor wireless channel modeling, femtocell networks, ad hoc networks, etc. His work has been sponsored by UK EPSRC, 6th/7th Framework Program, etc. Prof. Zhang has also been serving as the reviewer for EPSRC and 6th/7th Framework Program proposals. Prof. Zhang has published more than 100 academic papers since 2006 in top-tiered international journals. Prof. Zhang is also the co-founder of two IT companies, Ranplan Wireless Network Design Ltd in UK and its branch in China (in Jinan), both focusing on product development related to wireless network optimization.

University of Sheffield:
    University of Sheffield is one of the best engineering colleges in UK (top 3), and its EEE discipline ranks top 5 in UK. The university ranks between 69 and 88 according the ranking of Shanghai Jiaotong University and other rankings in past years.