In May 2019, IEEE Communication Society Distinguished Lecturer Sudhir Dixit was invited by the Nicaraguan, El Salvador and three Mexican ComSoc Chapters to conduct a Lecturer Tour. Nicaragua and El Salvador asked for two lectures while the Mexican Sections had just one each.
The tour started in Nicaragua where the local Communication Society chapter in cooperation with Nicaraguan Engineering University organized a day long conference event where Sudhir gave two talks. On the morning of May 22, people gathered at the auditorium ‘Salomon de la Selva’ at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria. With more than 100 participants, the first talk was on Software Defined Networks (SDN) and it was called: ‘SDN, OpenFlow and Virtualization’. Later in the afternoon, the second talk was on ‘Technologies for 5G’. Several university higher officials attended the talks, including the university vice president. They had high expectations about having cooperation projects.
Sudhir Dixit arrived in El Salvador very early in the morning on May 23. That day in the afternoon he was taken from his hotel to the Universidad Don Bosco where he gave his first talk on SDN. Several professors from the Electronics and Telecommunication departments attended the talk. Also, students from several undergraduate programs were invited. The next day he gave a talk for undergraduate students from the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of El Salvador. More than 100 undergraduate students attended the meeting. The talk was on the latest mobile communication technologies, among which were 5G and beyond. Sudhir proved to be a great communicator. It is not an easy task to show how the future would be, neither to explain what will become of the mobile communication industry.
As it has been our tradition with several DLTs, we took our guest to El Boqueron, a place at the top of the San Salvador volcano, about 1800 meter above sea level. San Salvador’s capital city is about 600 meters above sea level, so weather differences could be felt very sharply. New restaurants and coffee shops have been developed lately. Our guest enjoyed the small luxury of having a gourmet cup of coffee right at the top of a volcano. Several great ideas were discussed about helping the undeveloped world to get Internet access. As a Senior Fellow and Evangelist of Basic Internet at the Basic Internet Foundation in Norway, he could be a valuable asset to develop projects regarding Internet for rural areas.
On the same day, May 24, Sudhir departed to Mexico where he visited the cities of Morelos, Puebla and Guadalajara. On May 28, he gave a lecture at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE). The talk was focused on New Directions in Technology Innovations for 5G and Beyond. His aims were to highlight the major advances in technologies that will enable 5G to meet its objectives. Part of the talk was dedicated to explain new RAN technologies for 5G systems, more specifically, PHY layer technologies such as enhanced MIMO, Massive MIMO (also known as Large Scale Antenna Systems), mmWave ultra broadband transmission techniques and air interface adaptations for efficiently handling the massively parallel access in sensor networks for IoT applications, and networking solutions based on intra and inter technology heterogeneous networks (HetNets) as well as Cloud RAN architectures.