Henning Schulzrinne will speak about 5G cellular technology on Thursday, October 8 from 11 a.m.-noon in Hermann Hall Ballroom. Schulzrinne is a former chief technology officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2012 until 2014 and co-developer of the protocols RTP, RTSP and SIP. Schulzrinne’s presentation is free and open to the public. It is a part of the Real-Time Communications Conference.

Each generation of cellular technology has been based either on new radio access technology, or, more recently, on perceived or existing application needs. As we consider 5G, we can benefit from revisiting some of the assumptions that entered into previous generations of technology. Unlike the prior generational changes, all of which have probably yielded a significant increase in complexity each time, we now have the opportunity to greatly reduce the protocol and operational complexity of the overall system. For that, however, we may need to fundamentally change our assumptions about who operates network infrastructure, how devices are added to networks and who should trust whom. But a fundamental shift may well be the only way to reduce the 85% of revenue that flows into operational expenses.

Henning Schulzrinne, Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. MTS at AT&T Bell Laboratories; associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the Computer Science and EE departments at Columbia University. He served as chair of Computer Science from 2004 to 2009 and as chief technology officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2012 until 2014. Protocols co-developed by him, such as RTP, RTSP and SIP, are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. He is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE.