Experts and researchers in the field of telecommunications gathered at the conference to explore interesting and topical issues, such as 5G technologies.

The 17th edition of the IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband ICUWB’2017 has started in Salamanca and will continue over this week. This morning I led opening ceremony which took place in the Archbishop Fonseca College, together with Javier Prieto Tejedor (TPC Chair), Moe Win (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Thomas Ussmüller (University of Innsbruck) and Marco Chiani (University of Bologna). The ceremony highlighted the importance of communications in today’s world and 5G as the revolution of future communication. Thus, the need for such highly competent events persists and will continue to do so in the coming years.

Later on, Renato Lombardi (Director of Huawei’s Research Center, Italy) gave a talk to the audience on millimeter wave bands, a topic of great interest in recent years. He pointed out that millimeter wavebands can increase the performance of user equipment and that a large amount of bandwidth is being underused. In addition, the speaker outlined other issues, such as the key 5G requirements that drive the evolution of mobile access as well as trends in sub-millimeter wave technology.

Towards the end of his presentation, he placed emphasis on the importance of research in this area of ​​knowledge, something that ICUWB 17 largely contributes to.

Moreover, two great speakers gave their presentations on the 14th and 15th. Moe Win (Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) with an interesting session titled Network Localization and Navigation: Signal Processing Opportunities and Sofiène Affes (INRS, Canada), who spoke about Cost-, Spectrum-, and Energy-Efficient Distributed Collaborative Beamforming Designs for Real-World Applications.