Network disaggregation has been in the making for the better part of the past decade. The advent of 5G led to significant strides in this area which has resulted in important innovations and optimizations. RAN disaggregation has been the final frontier to achieve a desirable end-to-end architecture which can lead to further deployment innovation and promote many different deployments use cases. O-RAN alliance has emerged as a standards body with wide industry acceptance both with the CSP and vendors. Though the motivations for a disaggregated RAN are clear, one can envision challenges as well. This panel explores the opportunities and challenges in deploying and enabling a disaggregated RAN along with the current state of the industry in achieving the same.

Speaker/s Name and Company/University

Moderator: Mr. Subhas Chandra Mondal, Head of R&D, 5G products, HFCL Ltd.

Subhas leads the R&D efforts for 5G product development at HFCL as a vice president. In this role, Subhas works with Academia, Standards development organizations, Open-source community and Technology partners.
Prior to joining HFCL, Subhas served as the Chief Architect of Wipro’s organization-wide 5G initiative from 2018 to 2021. He was recognized as a Wipro Fellow for his technical contributions. He has over 30 years of engineering experience in Telecom Research & Development. He is a passionate technologist and has developed a variety of solutions & frameworks in emerging technology areas such as 5G, SDN/NFV, Li-Fi, Cyber Security and AI for Network Automation. Subhas holds an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering.

Moderator: Dr. Ajay Rajkumar, Design and system Engineering, Spirent Communications

Dr. Ajay Rajkumar is currently a Staff Design and Systems Engineer at Spirent Communications leading the design of their flagship Service and Network Assurance VisionWorks analytics product. Earlier, he was the Consulting Engagement Leader with Nokia Bell Labs Consulting. He also led the SDN and Programmable Networks domain as director in Mobile Networks CTO at Nokia. Dr. Rajkumar was named the top 10 inventors at Nokia Murray Hill of all times. He also received the IEEE Region 1 Technology Innovation award for pioneering work in the area of modeling, service applications, network performance, end-to-end flat mobile network architectures and seamless handover across heterogeneous wireless networks. Earlier, Dr. Rajkumar has received Bell Labs President’s Award for Design and Prototype of Base Station Router (BSR) which has since its early days evolved into Mobile Edge Computing and its concepts used to develop flat IP architectures across cellular standards. He has received another Bell Labs President’s Silver award for the first prototype that demonstrated seamless interworking across heterogeneous access networks for real-time applications. Dr. Rajkumar led the mobile industry to develop standards that enable ubiquitous coverage across heterogeneous access and was the Founding Chair of IEEE 802.21 for Media Independent Handover. He was also a Member of the IEEE 802 Executive Committee Board. He currently serves on the Computer Science Advisory Board of New York Institute of Technology, NY. Dr. Rajkumar has been a frequent invited speaker at research labs, universities, industry and technical panels. He has many reviewed publications, book chapters and has received more than 70 patents in very diverse areas of technology in all regions of the world. Dr. Rajkumar holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

Panelists

Udayan Mukherjee is the Intel Fellow and Chief technologist of Wireless Network for Intel’s Networking and Edge Group. He leads technology and product development related to wireless radio access and core networks, including Cloud-RAN, virtual RAN, base stations based on the 5G and mobile edge platforms, as well as gateways and packet core solutions. Udayan is also responsible for establishing new growth areas for Intel in the telecommunications market segment, a role that includes developing technologies and optimizations for telecom platforms designed for software-based networking and network function virtualization, developing wireless-specific intellectual property, and leading Intel’s 5G wireless network technology development.
Udayan’s research interests include mobile computing and communication platforms; Time Sensitive Networking for industrial usage, heterogeneous networks; next-generation air interface technologies; network virtualization; and mobile edge services and applications including private network for industrial. Udayan has been very involved with IEEE, ORAN alliance and TIP/Facebook, He has been previous keynote and distinguished speaker @ IEEE Globecom, IEEE WCNC, IEEE 5G Silicon Valley summits, IEEE NFIC, CTIA, GSMA, Cable Labs, ORAN Summits as well as FCC and other Global forums.

Dilip Krishnaswamy is currently serving as Vice President (Emerging Tech R&D) at Reliance Jio Platforms Ltd. Previously, he has worked as a senior scientist at IBM Research, as a platform architect at Intel, and as a senior staff researcher in the office of the chief scientist at Qualcomm. He has a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dilip is recipient of “Technologist of the Year 2020” award from IEEE Bangalore. His team was recognized at the 2021 TMForum Excellence Awards, the 11th Aegis Graham Bell Awards, the Leading Lights 2020 Awards (by Light Reading), and the Enterprise Blockchain 2020 Awards. He is an inventor on 60+ granted US patents, and has 70+ publications. His research interests include Distributed Processing in Networks, NFV/SDN, RAN/Core Disaggregation, 5G/6G Networks, Self-Organizing Networks, Quantum Processing, distributed ML/optimization.

Subodh Gajare, Senior Architect, Cisco R&D Centre, Bangalore. Subodh has over 25 years’ experience in IT industry. Core activities involve: Platform Development, testing, validation, designing, operations and developing solutions across technologies. Currently he is a Solution Architect for Cisco – Design and implement solutions for Service provider and Enterprise customers – based on SDN/NFV, IoT, Mobility (3G to 5G transformation), Security, Virtualization, Cloud, designing s/w Orchestration platforms for end-2-end management of networks. Subodh is a Technical Leader for incubating IoT industry solutions – in Digital Manufacturing, Smart Cities, Health care, Education, Energy and Transportation. He works as advisor for grooming future technical leaders/Architects in Cisco. He has been representing Cisco Networkers (now called Cisco Live) in Asia and US for past 14 years. Cisco Live is an industry event showcasing Cisco Innovative Solutions and architectures in an immersive learning model. He speaks at Cisco Technical leadership Forum globally – in Americas, Europe & Asia Pacific, Panel speaker for Digitization and IoT summits – India and US. Subodh is highly engaged with academia worldwide.

Robert Soni, VMWare