Abstract
Mobile Networks are nowadays keystone infrastructures in the global connectivity ecosystem. The expansion of Internet-of-Things and the ongoing "cloudization" of personal services will further increase their centrality. The quickly increasing criticality of such infrastructures contrasts with decreasing revenues for their operators. Furthermore, face to major progress of radio technologies from 2G to 4G (and prospectively 5G), the operation and management of the Mobile Network infrastructure as a whole has not evolved at the same pace: it remains still a largely manual process, pretty primitive when compared with recent advancements in other fields of Computer Science.
In other words, there is much more to a Mobile Network beyond the wireless link: while the latter has evolved in the last decade, considerably improving the efficiency of radio resources utilisation, the evolution of other components of the network infrastructure has been slower, especially on the side of network operation and management.

The basis for this talk is the idea that a combination of technological enablers and business drivers make the time now mature for a step change in the way these systems are architected, operated and managed (beyond the radio part). This is relevant to certain clear trends "within" the network technology, like Resource Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking, and "around" it (e.g., Crowdsourcing Apps, co-evolution of terminals and services). In the talk I will provide a prospective view of how such factors will interplay in the coming years and possibly combine with advances in other disciplines like Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning, making the case for a fundamental paradigm shift in the management and operation of Mobile Networks. In this framework, I will identify the potential opportunities but also the new elements of risk introduced by this change, and from there highlight some compelling research directions for Computer Scientists and Networking experts in the coming years.

Bio
Fabio Ricciato received the PhD in 2003 from University La Sapienza, Italy, with a Thesis in Telecommunication Networks. In 2004 he joined the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW), first as Senior Researcher and then as Key Researcher. He served as Manager for the Networking Area of FTW, leading a team of about 15 researchers and engineers across various research topics within the field of Communication Networks. Between 2007 and 2013 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Salento, Italy, teaching the courses of "Telecommunication Systems" and "Fundamentals of Communications". Between 2013 and 2014 he was with the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Vienna, leading the Business Unit “Dynamic Transportation Systems”. Since 2015 he is Professor at the University of Ljubljana Slovenia, where he teaches various courses in the field of wireless networks. Fabio has 15 years of international experience in applied research in the field of Communications and Computer Networks, both in academic and non-academic organisations.

With his team at FTW, he carried out a series of applied research projects in collaboration with a prominent Austrian telecom operator, focused on the monitoring and analysis of an operational 2G/3G/4G mobile network (METAWIN and DARWIN projects). Back in 2004, they were probably the first research group worldwide to access and process large-scale data from the internal section of an operational UMTS network. The monitoring system developed by his team was later turned into a commercial product and deployed for production use. His current research interests extend to various topics in the field of Communication Networks, including Network measurements, Traffic analytics, Security and Privacy, Cross-layer Wireless Networking, Software-defined radio and opportunistic radio-based localisation.