Around the world, municipalities have been making substantial investments into broadband access infrastructure to accelerate the build-out of an urban phenomenon that has become known as a smart or connected city. At the 2016 Optical Fiber Communications Conference, a team contest, the Connected OFCity Challenge, was held to discuss the technological innovations and to examine dependencies and intricacies of a connected city project. The participants, four teams of experts coming from a cross-section of the industry, presented and defended their visions of future applications and innovative architecture and technologies to realize the interconnection. This paper provides a synthesis of the four competitive proposals offered for the contest and their ensuing discussions.

Mobile network operators are facing the difficult task of significantly increasing capacity to meet projected demand while keeping CAPEX and OPEX down. We argue that infrastructure sharing is a key consideration in operators' planning of the evolution of their networks, and that such planning can be viewed as a stage in the cognitive cycle. In this paper, we present a framework to model this planning process while taking into account both the ability to share resources and the constraints imposed by competition regulation (the latter quantified using the Herfindahl index). Using real-world demand and deployment data, we find that the ability to share infrastructure essentially moves capacity from rural, sparsely populated areas (where some of the current infrastructure can be decommissioned) to urban ones (where most of the next-generation base stations would be deployed), with significant increases in resource efficiency. Tight competition regulation somewhat limits the ability to share but does not entirely jeopardize those gains, while having the secondary effect of encouraging the wider deployment of next-generation technologies.

The field of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) enables and encourages new approaches to how spectrum is owned, used, managed and licensed. Combining the wider access to spectrum which DSA promises with reconfigurable user deployed infrastructure opens up the opportunity to create mobile networks from the bottom-up rather than solely rely on traditional top-down architectures. In this paper we experimentally explore a means of allowing independent service providers using whatever spectrum they can find, to come together in a loose form of coalition which supports mobility between service providers. The service providers are not required to use similar network configurations - i.e. they can configure to best suit their needs and in line with what spectrum they find available. Our solution, first introduced in [1], involves the use of what we term a cyclostationary codec which in essence is a physical pattern that can be placed in the control channel of the service provider. This pattern is the key enabling mechanism for identifying the coalition, enabling rendezvous, supporting handover and conveying details of the service provider configuration. The paper focuses on experimental evaluation of a prototype system and explores the robustness of the concept.

In this paper we explore a means of allowing independent service providers using whatever spectrum they can find, to come together in a loose form of coalition which supports mobility between service providers. The service providers are not required to use similar network configurations- i.e. they can configure to best suit their needs and in line with what spectrum they find available. Our solution involves the use of what we term a cyclostationary codec which in essence is a physical pattern that can be placed in the control channel of the service provider. This pattern is the key enabling mechanism for identifying the coalition, enabling rendezvous, supporting handover and conveying details of the service provider configuration.

We propose a new architecture to enable wireless networks to meet the challenges of ever-increasing demand for high data rate services and ubiquitous connectivity, heterogeneity of access technologies, and spectrum scarcity. This architecture, which we call Networks without Borders, envisions a pool of resources (spectrum, infrastructure, network management, authentication, subscriber tracking services, etc.) from which a virtual wireless network can be orchestrated and instantiated. Flexibility and technology neutrality are key goals of this architecture, mirroring the Internet, where user services are independent of the underlying network control mechanisms or infrastructure. We outline some of the major trends in networking research and commercial deployments that provide an evolutionary path towards Networks without Borders. These trends include virtualization, reliance on small cells, dynamic spectrum sharing, crowdsourcing of wireless access, and inter-mobile operator resource sharing.

This paper focuses on a solution for a spectrum access system that can be deployed in the 3.5 GHz band to enable sharing of these bands between existing incumbents and new small cell systems. The FCC envisages some kind of dynamic data base as a means of supporting this sharing. In this paper we recommend that the database should support the use of adaptive spectrum masks, defined at the cell level, to control the emissions of the systems sharing the bands. The severity of the mask is context dependent and hence the least restrictive mask rather than one that represents a worst case scenario is used. Calculating the least restrictive spectrum mask in a context dependent manner involves examining an infinite number of potential scenarios. Our solution makes use of a pixelated database which results in large but finite no of possibilities and therefore converts the problem to a tractable one. A library of masks, each one corresponding to a specific scenario, is then stored in theh database. The fact that users must register with the database to access spectrum means it is possible to determine the distribution and density of users (i.e. the context). and retrieve the best mask. This will allow for far more efficient use of the spectrum then in a traditional system while still guaranteeing a certain QoS for the users.

The purpose of this demonstration is to show handover with continuous service between two independent base-station entities belonging to different operators. The handover occurs without any link layer connection between the base-stations and without prior knowledge of base-station operating frequencies or channelization on the part of the receiver. To achieve this, the system employs a receiver-driven approach to the handover[4].

This paper considers the use of a recently developed Bayesian statistical approximation technique that leads to very fast determination of highly accurate estimates for latent radio signal power. Following suitable data analysis, a first order non-stationary auto-regressive process is considered for latent radio signal and the fast approximation technique is then used to provide accurate estimates of the hidden model parameters. These estimates are based on having received several noisy, but spatially correlated, observations of the true latent signal. The implication of this technique for real time decision analysis and the problem of finding, and making use of, so-called radio spectrum holes is also discussed.