Gerald studied electrical and information engineering at the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Munich, Germany, with a concentration in information and communication technology. For his PhD he researched distributed, self-organizing routing protocols and network architectures for the Next Generation Internet and developed novel concepts and algorithms for their optimized operation.

In 2010 Gerald started as researcher for the next generation mobile core network in DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, working on improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) and efficiency of mobile networks. Since 2014, he has been leading DOCOMO Euro-Labs' standardization team which is active in the areas of 5th Generation Mobile Networks (5G) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In the latter topic, Gerald is participating in the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) OPNFV project and is a member of the LFN End-User Advisory Group (EUAG). Gerald is also a delegate in the ETSI ISG NFV contributing requirements and new functionality identified in DOCOMO’s NFV deployment to the standard specifications.

NTT DOCOMO started to study NFV more than 6 years ago, joined the ETSI ISG NFV from its first meeting in 2013, and was a founding member of the OPNFV community. In 2016, NTT DOCOMO deployed the world's first NFV technology running an Evolved Packet Core (EPC) from multiple vendors. Now it is time to extend and optimize our deployment in scale, agility, economic, ease of maintenance and from a failure resiliency point of view. Standardization and automation are key aspects towards these goals and we are working closely with our partners to share our best practices and to improve network services and customer experience. This presentation will give an insight to our successful past journey and our next steps towards an 5G era.