You are cordially invited to the Guest Lecture by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Çiçek Çavdar from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden at Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Eng. Seminer Room on 27 September 2024 @11:00.

Sustainable Networks: Energy and Cost Savings through Cell-free mMIMO, Open RAN, and AI-Driven Resource Management

The rapid evolution of 5G technology, designed to deliver high spectral efficiency, massive connectivity, and ultra-low latency, has spurred innovations such as Massive MIMO, millimeter wave communication, and dense small cell deployments. However, despite its greater energy efficiency compared to previous generations, 5G base stations consume significantly more energy. Two major research directions have emerged to address the challenge of sustainable networks. The first focuses on dynamically reconfiguring network resources to conserve energy during periods of reduced traffic load. The second explores network architectures and radio technologies that can be sustainable by design.

This talk will highlight key solutions from both areas: (1) AI-Assisted Sleep Mode Management: Machine learning has been applied to sleep mode management, determining when and how deeply to put network components to sleep to maximize energy savings. However, its full potential remains untapped due to concerns about performance degradation. The talk will introduce an AI-assisted, risk-aware sleep mode management framework, leveraging digital twins to continuously assess the risks of AI-driven decisions.(2) Joint Resource Orchestration in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks: The second part will focus on the joint orchestration of radio, processing, and fronthaul resources within Cell-Free Massive MIMO networks, under the Open RAN architecture, offering an integrated approach to energy and resource optimization.

Bio: Cicek Cavdar is an Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, where she leads the “Intelligent Network Systems” research group and serves as vice-head of the Communication Systems Division. She has played a pivotal role in numerous European projects, particularly in aerospace communications and sustainable network technologies. Since 2013, Cicek has led several EU projects focused on sustainability and green communications, including “5GrEEn,” SooGREEN, and AI4Green. Notably, AI4Green received the Eureka Innovations Award and the Celtic Excellence Award in 2024. In aerospace communications, she has coordinated industry-university collaborative projects since 2016, such as “ICARO-EU: Direct Air to Ground Communications for Europe” and currently “6G-SKY: 6G for Connected Sky.” Her research interests include the integration of non-terrestrial and terrestrial networks, edge/cloud computing, ultra-reliable low latency wireless communications, sustainability, and AI-assisted green network management.