Last week, on the 27th-28th I attended a nice wireless conference in berlin, the WLPC (Wireless LAN Pros Conference). You can visit their website at http://berlin2015.wlanprosconference.com.
This conference is a community-driven conference from wireless professionals with focus on typical topics that come up when you are planning or running large wireless networks. This is a mainly Twitter based community, you can see some Tweets with hashtags #WLPC for example. There were also some interesting talks about future networks, for example Marko Tisler gave a talk about wireless LAN and SDN and what we can expect and what SDN will not solve for wireless networks.
Another interesting talk was from Gregor Vučajnk, he talked about the LTE-U vs. Wi-Fi discussion that is currently going on. The problem there is that the unlicensed spectrum in 5GHz is at the moment in the focus of mobile operators that want to set up their LTE additionally in that frequency in parallel to Wi-Fi to save up the expensive licensed spectrum. LTE-U Forum (http://www.lteuforum.org/) what was formed in 2014 by Verizon in cooperation with Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and Samsung started in 2014 with a technical report that claims to use the unlicensed spectrum as well and they proposed LTE-U as a technique that could coexist with Wi-Fi on a common channel and share the bandwidth. The goal would here would be to use those unlicensed frequencies for the „best effort “-traffic and use the licensed frequencies for the control channel and more critical applications. There is also a position against the usage of LTE-U in the unlicensed spectrum. It was evaluated how the performance of WiFi with coexistence of LTE-U would behave. In the technical report of Nihar Jindal and Donald Breslin are the problems for this pointed out. They did experimental evaluation of the Protocol and one of the results for example was that its coexistence mechanism does not work properly when WiFi is received at a power level below 62 dBm, what is a usual signal strength on common Wi-Fi setups for some clients. You can find a report with a position aginst the spectrium sharing with LTE-U here: LTE-U Report. All talks were recorded on video and they have been published already, you can find them on vimeo. Video of this talk: here
During this conference I met a lot of new people there and had also some security related discussions with some of them, as this conference has no security aspects on its main focus. If you are interested in wireless topics this conference is a nice place to go.