Tomaso de Cola received the Master degree (with honors) in telecommunication engineering, in 2001, the Qualification degree as Professional Engineer in 2002 and the Ph. D. degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering, Robotics and Telecommunications in 2010 from the University of Genoa, Italy. From 2002 until 2007, he worked with the Italian Consortium of Telecommunications (CNIT), University of Genoa Research Unit, as scientist researcher. Since 2008, he has been with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), where he has been involved in several projects funded by EU and ESA programs, focusing on different aspects of DVB standards, CCSDS protocols, emergency communications, and testbed design. Since 2015 he has been appointed as leader of the Integrated Satellite Systems group.

He is taking part of different standardization activities within ETSI, IETF, DVB, and CCSDS, where he serves as deputy area director of the Space Internetworking Services (SIS). He is co-author of more than 70 papers, including international conferences and journals. His main research activity concerns: TCP/IP protocols, satellite networks, transport protocols for wireless links, interplanetary networks as well as delay tolerant networks, and communications strategies for emergency applications.

Dr. de Cola served on the Technical Program Committee at many IEEE International Conferences and as TPC chair for the satellite track in many ICC and Globecom editions. He is member of the IEEE Communications Society, where he is currently serving as chair of the Satellite and Space Communications (SSC) technical Committee (TC).

The recent advances in satellite technology development are expected to let Satellite industry play an important role in the overall development of the 5G ecosystem. In particular, the ambitious performance figures targeted by 5G community will certainly benefit from the convergence with satellite access segments, especially in the case of mobile networks and in the overall context of content delivery. From this standpoint, this talk will present the main challenges arising in this exercise from an R&D viewpoint, attempting to shed some lights on the possible solutions and the necessary effort to further address unexplored or partly explored problems towards 5G and beyond.