Mobile (cellular) networks have traditionally been closed systems, developed as vertically integrated and blackbox appliances by a few equipment vendors and deployed by a handful of national scale mobile network operators in each country, all in all a small ecosystem. However, we have witnessed a radical transformation in the design and deployment of mobile networking systems in the recent past that reflects a path towards greater openness. In this talk, I’ll give my perspective on the key drivers (economic and beyond) behind this trend and the main enablers for this transformation. I’ll complement this by outlining my key research contributions in this direction. Further, I’ll highlight one of my recent works, CoreKube, that rearchitects the mobile core control plane for efficient cloud-native operation and serves as a basis for open (multi-vendor) core. Finally, considering Open RAN, I’ll outline the opportunity for even greater openness and efficiency gains via data-driven operation and leveraging the power of AI.
Prof. Mahesh Marina is a Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads the Networked Systems Research Group, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institute for data science and AI) for five years (2018-23) and has also served as the Director of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture within Informatics@Edinburgh for four years till July 2022. Prior to joining Edinburgh, he had a two-year postdoctoral stint at the UCLA Computer Science Department after earning his PhD in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has previously held visiting researcher positions at ETH Zurich and at Ofcom (the UK’s telecommunications regulator) at their Headquarters in London. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member.