IEEE WCNC is the world premier wireless event that brings together industry professionals, academics, and individuals from government agencies and other institutions to exchange information and ideas on the advancement of wireless communications and networking technology.

The conference will feature a comprehensive technical program offering numerous technical sessions with papers showcasing the latest technologies, applications and services. In addition, the conference program includes workshops, tutorials, keynote talks from industrial leaders and renowned academics, panel discussions, a large exhibition, business and industrial forums.

The 2018 edition of this conference is going to take place in Barcelona. 

The program will consist of tutorials, technical sessions, plenary lectures and expert panel sessions. In parallel with the main conference, a series of open workshops on hot topic areas will also be hosted. The conference will also organize a Start-up contest and a PhD thesis competition. 

One of the most intriguing one will be "The First International Workshop on Edge and Fog Systems for 5G & Beyond (IWEF).

In addition to Clouds, the Edge and Fog are emerging as defining locations in 5G where much of the network intelligence and service innovation could also be envisioned. The move to the Edge was originally driven by the desire of operators and cloud providers to deliver low latency services and avert inevitable network congestion by keeping locally a huge amount of local traffic. The list of usages and opportunities brought by the Edge and Fog could only grow quickly especially when imagined with network softwarization tools of SDN and NFV. The move to the Edge has also helped the rediscovery of a wealth of dormant assets in the local access network. These dormant assets are essentially contextual information collected from the users, devices, and nodes. Putting this data on offer to application and service providers keen on optimizing and customizing their service delivery to the end customers proved compelling for all stakeholders.

This workshop provides a forum for scientists, engineers, and researchers to discuss and exchange new ideas, standards, novel results and experience on all aspects of delivering an integrated virtualized edge and fog system.

Numerous challenges will be faced during the event:

1- Identifying which context information and what functions from each access network may be of value to host at the Edge either to improve own access network services or other services from other access networks separately or jointly

2- Defining mechanisms to collect and deliver this context information where and when it is needed, as well as the placement and chaining of access network functions throughout the Edge

3- Exploring which access network entities (including terminal devices) could offer their resources and capabilities to dynamically scale the integrated edge

4- Designing automated and secure mechanisms to discover and federate all the edge resources which may be volatile/mobile, heterogeneous, not directly interconnected, and may belong to multiple owners

5- Defining all the interactions that need to be supported between the edge and non-edge domains such as the transport network, core network, and distant clouds.

For further information and get to know more of the 4 days programme, you can check here details