1. NITRD Complex Engineered Networks Panel II: What are the grand challenges in networking methodologies?
Robert Doverspike (AT&T Labs – Research)
Sept 20-21, 2012

2. How do we better integrate wireline and wireless networking?
Wireline networking has evolved for the past 100 years
From manually switched analog voice calls to automatically switched, high speed consumer and business data
Wireless networking has been prominent for < 25 years
Wireless networking has concentrated on the cellular Radio Access Network (RAN) to provide mobile, analog voice calls
Then “backhaul” the cell tower to a central office via Time Division Multiplex (TDM) circuits over the wireline network
Recently, there has been a major, frantic shift to provide data, Internet access, video, and platforms for mobile networking applications
As a result, the RAN technologies have tended to reuse wireline IP technologies and standards as a “overlay” and ram the wireless and wireline network together
This hybrid has inefficiencies. In particular, how shall we engineer end-to-end performance & reliability in this hybrid wireless/wireline network?
RAN has major analog signal issues such as fading, power, and interference - the typical wireline point-to-point “reference circuit” models don’t apply
Technical issues surround round trip times, delay, packet overhead, voice/data channel sharing, massive data centers, and routing