June 2014 Issue
News and Events

Tokyo Wireless Technology Summit 2014

Tokyo Wireless Technology Summit 2014
Speakers and symposium committee members

The international symposium on fifth generation (5G) cellular communications systems--Tokyo Wireless Technology Summit 2014--was held by the Advanced Wireless Communications Research Center (AWCC) in collaboration with the Global Information and Telecommunications Institute (GITI) of Waseda University, at the Masaru Ibuka Auditorium at Waseda University, Tokyo, on 7 March 2014. Beyond our expectation, more than 200 people from industry and academia participated in the symposium and thoroughly enjoyed the talks by the talented speakers.

Tokyo Wireless Technology Summit 2014
Audience enjoyed quite inspiring talks from distinguished professors

The main theme of this symposium was to envision the future of wireless technologies with potential services and markets through inspiring talks and fruitful discussions. The symposium was also intended to reveal technical issues and key enablers of 5G systems.

The six speakers invited to share their perspectives on these issues were: Fumiyuki Adachi (Tohoku University, Japan); Elvino Sousa (University of Toronto, Canada); Rahim Tafazolli( University of Surrey, U.K.); Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers University, U.S.A); Rudy Lauwereins (IMEC, Belgium); and Zhisheng Niu (Tsinghua University, China).

Tokyo Wireless Technology Summit 2014
Attendee actively and friendly discussed 5G systems at coffee break

The speakers gave talks from not only theoretical but also practical points of view including a heterogeneous system design with macro- and micro-cells to boost the system capacity; difficulties of microwave circuit design for mm-wave signals; emerging network architecture design to integrate mobile networks with infrastructure. All the speakers pointed out that 5G networks would have to deliver data capacities of 1000 times more than the capabilities of 4G networks, based on the mobile data traffic forecast for 2020. However, they also highlighted that the goal of 5G systems is not only to achieve even higher spectral efficiency, but also to give users the feeling that they have "infinite capacity" by always ensuring each user's instantaneous data rate for a specific application. Attendees actively asked the speakers many questions and after the session, the participants enjoyed friendly discussions about the talks over coffee.

The symposium succeeded and contributed to the acceleration of research and development in order to realize a networked society with 5G.