Keynote speech at IWSS 2016 (in WCNC 2016 @ Doha)

I will be giving a keynote speech today April 3rd, 2016 at the IEEE International Workshop on Smart Spectrum (IEEE IWSS), to be collocated with the IEEE WCNC 2016 (IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference)  in Doha, Qatar.

My presentation is titled “Vehicle Communications and Spectrum Allocation: State of the Art & Trends”.

Few lines about the scope of my talk: Connected and autonomous driving are the future of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and road safety, and they have never been closer to market than today. In fact, all big car makers have been working on enabling such technologies, of which some fractions have been already deployed in some nowadays high class vehicles, such as using broadband communication to bring Internet inside the car, or relaying on stand-alone sensors to let the car parks by itself or automatically adjust the distance to the front car on the highway. Many more life-saving and useful features will come-out in the future when the full versions of these emerging technologies are deployed.Connected vehicles technology, which is also a key enabler for autonomous driving, is based on a WiFi-like short range wireless communication aka vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication. Such a technology offers a low latency communication which is necessary to enable real-time coordination among nearby vehicles and road infrastructure,which is required to enable critical-safety applications as well as autonomous driving. But it requires a dedicated radio spectrum to ensure the reliability level which is required for the safety applications, therefore a radio spectrum has to be allocated exclusively to this type of communication. For example, in both Europe and US a limited spectrum has been allocated around 5.9 Ghz for few years to test and validate the technology. But still many other places around the world need to adopt such a spectrum allocation to facilitate the deployment of the Connected Vehicles technology. This talk will provide an overview about Connected Vehicles and related international and local efforts as well as open challenges towards the commercial deployment.