San Diego 5G Summit

By Liangping Ma - Chair of IEEE ComSoc San Diego Chapter, USA

On April 19-20, 2019, the beautiful city of San Diego, CA, a city well-known for some of the pioneering work in wireless communication, saw the IEEE 5G Summit held there for the first time. Organized by the IEEE San Diego Section and the IEEE Communication Society, the summit (http://www.5gsummit.org/sandiego/) offered keynote speeches, panel discussions and tutorials covering the landscape, deployment use cases, business models, intellectual property, policy issues, and fundamental technologies of 5G. The speakers included leaders and experts from industry, academia, and government, as well as entrepreneurs. The summit was well attended, with a turnout of more than 200 people. and was financially supported by companies such as Qualcomm Technologies, Intel, Samsung and InterDigital, among which Qualcomm also provided the venue.

Dr. Durga Malladi, Senior Vice President, General Manager of 4G/5G of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., delivering a keynote titled ”5G: From Concept to Commercialization, and What’s Next”.

There were three keynote speakers. Dr. Durga Malladi, Senior Vice President, General Manager of 4G/5G of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., gave a keynote titled ”5G: From Concept to Commercialization, and What’s Next.” Caroline Y. Chan, Vice President, Data Center Group, Intel, General Manager, Network Business Incubator Division of Intel, gave a keynote titled “5G Accelerating Enterprise Digital Transformation.” Mansoor Hanif, CTO of OfCom, UK, gave a keynote titled “Ofcom Priorities for UK Regulation: Universality, Fairness, Reliability and the role of Innovation.”

Also among the programs were five high-quality panel sessions, spanning the 5G radio access networks to the core network, 3GPP standards, implementation and manufacturing challenges, power efficiency of the RF frontend, deployment use cases, patents, policies and innovation. I moderated the panel “Standards and Deployment”, which focused on the standards status and challenges in producing equipment and deploying systems. The panelists were Dr. Mingxi Fan, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, XCOM-labs; Dr. Jungwon Lee, Vice President, Samsung; Dr. Juan Montojo, Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.; and Dr. Byung K. Yi, Executive in Residence, EvoNexus.

Dr. The panelists for the “Standards and Deployment” session (from left to right): Dr. Byung K. Yi of EvoNexus, Dr. Mingxi Fan (XCOM-labs), Dr. Jungwon Lee (Samsung), Dr. Juan Montojo (Qualcomm Technologies). The moderator (first from right) Dr. Liangping Ma (InterDigital).

In addition, the summit offered three in-depth tutorials covering the fundamentals of 5G radio access networks, core networks and power efficiency. All these sessions were well attended.

The summit fulfilled the goal of bringing together the technical and business communities in San Diego (with some experts from outside San Diego) to discuss the opportunity of 5G and beyond. Many attendees expressed appreciation to the organizing committee for assembling this event which greatly helped them better understand various aspects of 5G.