Distinguished Lecturers

Latif holds the following positions: President, IPv6 FORUM www.ip6forum.org, Chair, European IPv6 Task Force www.ipv6.eu , Emeritus Trustee, Internet Society www.isoc.org , Board Member IPv6 Ready & Enabled Logos Program and Board Member World Summit Award www.wsis-award.org .

Latif Ladid is a Senior Researcher at the University of Luxembourg “Security & Trust” (SnT) www.securityandtrust.lu on multiple European Commission Next Generation Technologies IST Projects.

Latif is also a Member of 3GPP PCG (www.3gpp.org), 3GPP2 PCG (www.3gpp2.org), Vice Chair, IEEE ComSoc TCIIN , Member of UN Strategy Council, member of IEC Executive Committee and member of the Future Internet Forum EU Member States, representing Luxembourg: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/lead/fif/index_en.htm .

The transition to IPv6 did not happen over the past decade with the objectives of achieving a smooth and low-cost Internet sustainability through incremental refresh of technology. The reasons can be traced back to the mixed messages sent to industry: hard-to-justify ROI; address depletion confusion and the lack of market demand. IPv6 is a worldwide and large-scale plumbing exercise. Only engineers should fix it and offer IPv6 as an extended service to sustain the Internet growth and continuity. Now, it's abundantly clear that the address space has evaporated in front of our eyes, putting an end to the growth of the Internet. The address space has melt down in February 2011 at IANA level and by end of 2012 at Registry level in Asia and Europe/Middle East. The transition is not well prepared and there will be winners and losers. Pioneers will benefit from the head start. Followers cannot predict what will happen to them. This is the first time the Internet will get a face lift and probably the last one for decades to come. The lessons learnt from this are that it takes a lot of patience and passion to bring this transition to fruition.

• The Internet community has mistakenly focused on the IPv4 address depletion as the problem to be resolved by IPv6 for the ISPs for connectivity to web sites and forgotten to address the many issues that will affect the adoption of IPv6 by the enterprise and the critical infrastructure that are brought in by a transition from an established protocol (IPv4) to a new protocol (IPv6)

• The transition in the enterprise should be focused on a “secure transition” and a “secure integration” of IPv6. The only viable secure transition is the “secure Dual-stack” transition. All other transition mechanisms are not secure and will even drill in new vulnerabilities in the critical infrastructure networks to name the important one.

• The transition to IPv6 has to be done in the first phase to sustain not only technology parity between IPv4 features but also business models parity.

• The current deployment of IPv6 is done with IPv4 network management tools. This is a fallacy as IPv6 is a new protocol with totally different functions and features. It should be deployed with new management tools designed to cater for IPv6 features not just mimicking IPv4 and NAT. In the second phase, IPv6 should be deployed with its built-in functionalities (multicast, mobility, end to end...)

• The security in IPv6 is again not deployed, similarly to IPv4. Security is mandated in IPv6 but still no security house or solutions start with secure functionality.

• IPv6 Privacy Address is deployed only by Microsoft. All other vendors have not yet realised the randomizing features of the MAC address.

• The cost of deploying IPv6 is from now on a costly fork-lift upgrade for those that have not taken the early step of deployment. The cost of not doing anything is even higher.

• What is at stake is the “modernisation of the networks” to cater and be securely ready for all new emerging Internet based solutions like Internet of Things, Smart Grids, Cloud Computing, Smart homes and Buildings, Smart Cities, Mobile networks such LTE and Safety networks to replace aging TETRA, Mobile social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter, Mobile Internet cars, Mobile Military networks, Smart Agriculture and Food chains, Smart manufacturing, Mobile Smart Banking, … a Smarter world.

Ahmed E. Kamal is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University in the USA. He received a B.Sc. (distinction with honors) and an M.Sc. both from Cairo University, Egypt, and an M.A.Sc. and a Ph.D. both from the University of Toronto, Canada, all in Electrical Engineering . He is Fellow of the IEEE and a senior member of the Association of Computing Machinery. He is also an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2013 and 2014.

Kamal's research interests include cognitive radio networks, optical networks, wireless sensor networks, and performance evaluation. He received the 1993 IEE Hartree Premium for papers published in Computers and Control in IEE Proceedings, and the best paper award of the IEEE Globecom 2008 Symposium on Ad Hoc and Sensors Networks Symposium.

Kamal was the chair or co-chair of the Technical Program Committees of a number of IEEE sponsored conferences including the Optical Networks and Systems Symposia of the IEEE Globecom 2007, and the IEEE Globecom 2010, and is the co-chair of the IEEE Globecom Cognitive Radio and Networks Symposium in 2012. He is also the lead chair of the IEEE Globecom Cognitive Radio and Networks Symposium in 2014. He is on the editorial boards of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, the Computer Networks journal, and the Optical Switching and Networking journal.

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have emerged as a promising, yet challenging, solution to enhance spectrum utilization, thanks to the technology of Software Defined Radios. A well-known property of CRNs is the potential heterogeneity in channel availability among secondary users. Multicasting, which is used by a growing number of applications, may suffer from significant throughput degradation when used in CRNs because of this property. This is because a source may need to transmit the multicast data over multiple channels to guarantee delivery to all neighboring receivers

This talk will introduce strategies to reduce the effect of the channel heterogeneity property on the multicast throughput in cognitive radio wireless mesh networks (CR-WMNs), hence enhancing the multicasting throughput. These strategies circumvent the effect of channel heterogeneity by implementing cooperation between nodes. This cooperation is composed of two main activities: first, allowing multicast receivers to assist the source in delivering the data, and second, allowing the transmission of network coded packets so that multicast receivers belonging to different multicast groups can decode and extract their data concurrently. We present a framework for implementing this cooperative strategy, within cells in CR-WMNs, and also between cells. Optimal and heuristic packet transmission scheduling approaches will be introduced for implementing the proposed assistance strategy. Performance results show that the proposed cooperative paradigm achieves a considerable reduction in the total multicast time, which in turn increases the system throughput.