Real-Time Communications Conference

The IEEE Real-Time Communications Conference at Illinois Institute of Technology is a globally recognized collaborative event where industry and academia connect. Leveraging its unique academic setting, this annual conference brings together technical professionals and business executives from the data and telecommunications industry, standards bodies, policy and regulatory institutions, and academic educators and researchers to promote an open exchange of ideas to lead future development in the rapidly changing field of real-time communications.

The cloud is one of the defining technologies of the twenty-first century. By virtue of increased flexibility and cost-effectiveness relative to traditional information technology, it has put vast computing resources at the fingertips of billions of people. At the same time, rapidly rising mobile data consumption, coupled with the high costs for deploying 5G are forcing operators to re-examine how they deploy next generation networks. This is leading network operators to begin transitioning to advanced technologies such as a cloud-native 5G mobile core architecture, virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRAN), and increased reliance on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable network automation.

This evolution makes it possible to build, deploy, and operate new communications services quickly and with relative ease. It increases the number of communications developers and ushers in an era of “programmable real-time networks” that are focused not only on technologies such as 5G, virtualization, and machine learning (ML), but also on potential future intersections with technologies such as dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), blockchain distributed ledgers, quantum computing, and many others.

This transition toward programmable networks gives rise to a new class of developer, network engineers armed with the ability to programmatically interact with the networks they administer. Programmatic interfaces enable network engineers to automate the creation of new network services, rapidly accelerating real-time network creation and service activation functions, and to monitor and scale existing network services in real time to meet the rapidly increasing demands of the applications that run on top of them.

This conference will focus on the technologies behind the shift to programmable real-time networks, new skills required for the emerging class of network developers, and how these technologies are democratizing the way developers and network engineers create value and solve problems in disparate verticals.

To learn more, visit the Real-Time Communications Conference website.