On September 18, 2018 Chicago Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Women in Engineering event was held at Nokia in which the participants learned about the technological advancements from the second to the fourth Industrial Revolution. The evening started with an introductory presentation by Nina Rouhanizadeh, Chair of Chicago IEEE Women in Engineering and LTE/5G Engineer at Nokia. Nina discussed the four stages of Industrial Revolution and emphasized the importance of 5G communication networks as part of the fourth Industrial Revolution. With emerging technologies such as connected cars, robotics, and virtual reality applications, 5G network will be essential to support massive connectivity, enhanced mobile broadband, and highly reliable and low latency communication.

The presentation also highlighted some of the women leaders in technology from the Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs from the 1900s to the present time.

Following, participants joined Chuck Rehor at the Nokia Naperville Campus Museum. Chuck, Senior Engineer at Nokia, spoke about the inventions and innovations that replaced the clunky mechanics of bygone years with scalable and reliable electronics that started the Electronic Switching System (ESS) family. The Nokia Naperville Museum contains many interesting artifacts such as the first ever microprocessor designed and built by Bell Labs, a multi-million-dollar circuit pack, and Nokia small cells used in today’s LTE networks.

With Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, and 5G Networks, Nokia is driving innovation and the future of technology to power the digital age and transform how people live, work, and communicate. Participants joined the Nokia Naperville Campus Cloud Innovation Center as Ted East, Vice President of Innovation and Realization at Nokia, demonstrated some of Nokia’s cloud solutions and applications that are essential in the 5G networks.

At first, the audience enjoyed a demonstration of automation in a live LTE network using a Wack-A-Mole. As the moles were hit, Virtual Machines were randomly destroyed and automatically reconstructed. This was a fun and interactive way of showing how automation in the cloud can fix network failures without any service interruption.

With increased automation in cloud solutions, it is extremely important not to lose visibility of the network. The audience observed how services can be located in the network using a 3D metaphored User Interface where the physical and virtual network resources were shown side by side. Networks have to become a lot more dynamic to support the required bandwidth with the new connected devices and applications. As a result, participants witnessed how a request can be put into the network first to move services from a physical to virtual network and second to move them from one location to another.

Another important key factor in the 5G networks is Network Slicing. It allows multiple virtual networks to run on top of a physical network infrastructure. In today’s networks, it would take several weeks to slice a network. With the Nokia SW solutions, the participants experienced a live demonstration that revealed network slicing can be done in a matter of about twenty minutes. Once the private network slice was created, an LTE enabled camera was connected to the network slice. This demonstration showed that enterprises can quickly create their own slice of the LTE/5G network that is secure and has dedicated bandwidth and tailored Quality of Service to support applications that consume a lot of data.

After the presentation, participants enjoyed a networking session with other engineering professionals.