IEEE LANMAN 2008 PANEL

"Ubiquitous Community Wireless Networks: Reality or pipedream? Opportunities, challenges, pitfalls"

Technical challenges (technology, deployment, environment, operation and management, tradeoffs)
* Lots of networks, heterogeneous networking technology
* Rapid deployment of different types of networks/technologies (e.g., infrastructure-based and delay tolerant networks, rfid-tags, metropolitan networks, mesh networks)
* Interference and coordination and management of access
* Differential QoS
* Interoperability, convergence and connectivity
* Cooperative access sharing (e.g., scalable meshes)
* Open access wireless networks (e.g., metropolitan networks)
* Distributed caches
* Cognitive and intelligent radios

Economic models/challenges/opportunities (initial buildout, ongoing operational costs, commercial versus community initiative, sustainability)
* More complex, more competitive
* Issues of interoperability, convergence, and connectivity
* Will community wireless network replace other access technologies
* Service pricing models, e.g., strictly flat-fee, usage based,tiered service

User expectations/needs
* What are the benefits to the end users?
* Broadband traffic grows exponentially, heavy users, diversity in application requirements
* Quotas and application blocking
* Supporting different kinds of traffic (voice, data, video)
* Security needs/expectations
* Reliability/uptime (dealing with power failures)
* Dealing with abuse (physical, hackers, remote attacks)

Moderator:
K.K. Ramakrishnan, AT&T Labs Research, USA

Panelists:
Paul Cullen, Garderos Software Innovations, Germany
Timo Braysy, University of Oulu, Finland
Cornel Pampu, Huawei Technologies, Germany
Cristian Patachia-Sultanoiu, Orange, Romania
George Polyzos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University, USA