An Interview with Marcin Dryjanski

Marcin Dryjanski

Principal Consultant & CEO Rimedo Labs

Key Topics:5G, Open RAN, wireless systems

Location:Poznań, Poland

Bio:

Marcin Dryjanski received his Ph.D. (with distinction) from the Poznan University of Technology in September 2019. Currently, he serves as CEO and principal consultant at Rimedo Labs, a spin-off of the Poznan University of Technology focusing on Open RAN solutions and consulting. Prior to joining Rimedo Labs, Marcin worked as an external contractor at Huawei Technologies Sweden and as a board member at Grandmetric. Over the past 15 years, Marcin served as an R&D engineer, consultant, technical trainer, technical leader, advisor and a board member. Marcin has been involved in 5G design since 2012, when he was a work-package leader in the FP7 5GNOW project. From 2018, he is a Senior IEEE Member. Marcin is a co-author of many articles on 5G and beyond and a co-author of the book „From LTE to LTE-Advanced Pro and 5G” (M. Rahnema, M. Dryjanski, Artech House 2017).

How did you get to become an expert in your key topics?

It all started at the Erasmus studentship, where I was during my final year of master’s studies. There was a professor who taught us differently, compared to the typical way of teaching at the university. The difference came from the fact that he wasn’t only into formulas and theoretical discussions, but it was a very practical lecture on mobile communications explained simply. In addition to that, we were supposed to present to him our master’s topics in a similarly simple way. This is where I started to learn how to grasp complex topics and translate them in an easy-to-understand way.

In my first job, I was exposed to both – conducting training on cutting-edge technology (back then it was LTE) and researching the latest technological advancements. Such combination was going on throughout my whole career till today – I’m working on the latest mobile communications technologies, doing research, and translating them into training materials to explain them through commercial workshops.

In addition to that, in the training courses, I was always exposed to a variety of people with different backgrounds and experiences who often shoot at me difficult questions which required me to dig more into the topic and get more information about it. Therefore, it was always two-way learning – i.e. I was supposed to teach the participants, but they also made me learn more during the training.

In summarizing, what brought me to become experienced in the topic was exposure to both research and teaching at the same time.

Who influences you on these topics?

What challenges are brands facing in this space?

In the O-RAN space, at this stage, there is a lack of maturity of the system parts and standardization – there’s still a lot to do. The other very important aspect is the security of the new way of handling networks, which needs (and is) to be taken care of.

The other challenge relates to the use of 5G networks (mobile/wireless systems) for verticals, i.e. in the form of private mobile networks. In this context, the multitude of requirements requires a tailored approach for deployment and usage of the 5G system within businesses, which is new to the mobile industry. This is also, where the language that is used by the traditional vendors and mobile network operators is different from the one used by the actual businesses, which have specific needs – and this is where all need to be aligned to provide and answer those needs with the technology.

Yet another topic associated with 5G is network slicing, which is a very interesting topic from an R&D perspective, but very complex to unleash its potential when comes to real deployments.

Finally, I think one of the important challenges is the hype, which comes with those technologies. My favorite sentence here is “5G is THE answer. Now, what was the question?”. There is a huge gap between marketing vs reality/practice in this field.

What do you think the future holds in this space?

There are two options, I could see with regards to the O-RAN topic within the field:

* one option is that we will have multiple companies and a larger ecosystem of O-RAN vendors, integrators, etc. with software platforms that allow third-party implementations of various software pieces – and that would change the way, the mobile networks are deployed, operated and evolving;

* the other option is that there will be for some time a lot of new entrants popping up for various parts of the system, which will then be “cherry-picked” by the big companies (not necessarily the ones, who are currently leading the market), which will end up in the same situation, we have till now (with few big companies delivering the networks), but with possibly other players … and there are possibly something in between as well :).

The other aspect is moving towards 6G. In that context, if we move to a fully software-based and open network, we may see a change in the way, the networks are evolving, i.e. from generation-based evolution to feature-based evolution. This comes from the fact that once we have IT-based concepts, like virtualization, CI/CD, containers, and microservice-based features in place for mobile networks as we had in the other fields, it may lead to constant, but fragmented innovation, which would allow for the ongoing evolution of different parts of the system. You may find some more elaboration on this topic in one of my “short” papers, under this link.

If a brand wanted to work with you, which activities would you be most interested in collaborating on?

Podcasts, webinars, whitepaper, speaking opportunities, product innovation, and video interviews.

What are your passions outside of work?

Sailing, hiking in the mountains, basketball, reading crime stories.

What would be the best way for a brand to contact you?

Linkedin or email.

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An Interview with Marcin Dryjanski

by Margarita Ventura | Jul 20, 2022 | Interviews, Tech