Welcome message from the General Co-chairs
Welcome to IEEE DySPAN 2015 – a conference that is again back right in the middle of exiting technical developments. Now under the label "5G", the rapid growth of traffic in wireless mobile and nomadic access is rapidly is on its way to dwarf all other wireless applications. Although still not clearly defined, "5G" seems to be about more than just more wireless access capacity. Large scale and mission critical M2M applications are also important technology drivers.
The need for finding new ways to efficiently use and reuse the electromagnetic spectrum is larger than ever. Dynamic and secondary spectrum access are being looked at as interesting candidate technologies, but in order to make them take their place in the commercial mainstream, we have to change gears. In the early experimenter days of “cognitive radio”, most efforts were focused on answering the questions "will it work?", and “Can Dynamic Spectrum Access create new business opportunities?” The answers have been a resounding “yes” for a number of applications. The focus for the next decade will, however, be scalability. For wide-spread commercial success, it is not sufficient that a technology works for some users in some locations – instead we need to address the question "Will it work for billions of users?" For the short-range, ultra-dense access-point deployment needed to address the "capacity-crunch" things look very promising.
The unique blend of policy and technology topics in IEEE DySPAN has been one of its key trademarks. In order to make significant impact on industry and policy making, we hope that IEEE DySPAN 2015 will feature presentations that exhibit an even more tight integration between technology and policy than in previous IEEE DySPAN events. We think that the ideal technology paper should be innovative and focus on novel spectrum policies whereas the ideal policy paper should also address technical aspects and limitations of the proposed policies.
Although most of the early activities in dynamic spectrum access have transpired on the US scene, a lot of recent activities have been driven by Asia and Europe. In Asia the capacity expectations for future systems are very high, as for example manifested in the ambitious Japanese programs for the Tokyo Olympics 2020. In Europe, Industry, Universities and Regulators have been conducting a number of innovative spectrum projects within the European Commission FP7 research program. We expect new and interesting results to be presented from those activities at the conference. Recently, the 5G Private Public Partnership (5GPPP) has emerged as maybe one of the most powerful initiatives in this era. Spectrum use and management will also be important topics in the 5GPPP project portfolio in the Horizon 2020 research program.
Locating IEEE DySPAN 2015 in Europe is thus timely in order to highlight commonalities and difference between European and US approaches to spectrum policy making. IEEE DySPAN 2015 is backed by a pan-European initiative, involving most of the key players in the spectrum domain in Europe, including key industry players, regulators, leading universities and the European Commission itself.
We believe that IEEE DySPAN 2015 is THE place to be if you are interested in flexible spectrum use and future spectrum management!
Welcome to Stockholm in September 2015!
Jens Zander Magnus Frodigh
General co-chairs