Kenji Shimizu is a senior research engineer at wireless systems innovation laboratories at NTT, where he is working for end-end wireless system orchestration especially from the viewpoint of future architecture of various wireless access systems in a integrated virtualized infrastructure. The target of his research is not limited to cellular systems, but also includes multiple unlicensed-band wireless systems.

Increasing number of unlicensed and licensed wireless protocols such as NB-IoT, LoRa, 11ah, etc., are proposed especially for IoT communication recently.

Toward the year 202X and beyond-5G era, we imagine one candidate architecture of efficient wireless access network targeting such heterogeneous environment, where operators deploy wireless access networks for various wireless protocols under their quality controls, because the communication quality of especially unlicensed wireless protocols are subject to degrade without coordination.

Considering IoT devices which are difficult to change their wireless protocols once deployed in fields, and whose wireless protocols must be long supported due to devices' product life cycle, operators' networks need to be flexible enough to accommodate such a large number of wireless protocols with full quality optimization capability.

We proposed one suitable architecture by utilizing software-defined-radio (SDR) in combination with recent SDN/NFV technology. By regarding End-End networks including radio as resources, operators offer optimized and various kind of wireless access network slices for IoT service providers.

We have implemented our prototype using open-source software such as OpenStack and GnuRadio, which is software-defined-radio platform, to softwarize computing resources and various wireless protocols, and then utilize NFV MANO-compliant orchestration software, Open Baton to manage when and where required wireless access network slices are deployed.