iPOP 2026

For decades, communication infrastructure evolved around a hop-by-hop networking model. While coherent optical transmission dramatically extended transport distance from "truck distance" to "flight distance," long-haul optical connectivity remained confined to large carrier facilities.
The emergence of coherent pluggables changes this equation. By enabling long-distance optical connectivity directly from routers and switches at enterprise, cloud, and edge locations, coherent pluggables make a new infrastructure architecture possible: Hub-and-Optical-Spoke networking.
At the same time, the rapid adoption of AI is fundamentally changing infrastructure requirements. AI systems introduce unprecedented demands for bandwidth, latency, deterministic quality, synchronization, and dynamic resource consumption. Traditional networking architectures, originally optimized for human-centric communication, struggle to satisfy these requirements efficiently.
This keynote examines how recent advances in coherent optics are enabling a broader transformation of communication infrastructure. Drawing parallels with the evolution of global logistics from truck transportation to aviation-based hub-and-spoke systems, we explore how direct optical flights can create a more scalable, predictable, and software-operable foundation for AI-era infrastructure.
The presentation will also introduce the work of the IOWN Global Forum, including Open APN and Deterministic Network, and discuss how open optical ecosystems can accelerate the development of AI-native infrastructure spanning cloud, edge, industrial sites, and future distributed computing environments.

Masahisa Kawashima is currently leading NTT's R&D of Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) as the technical director of IOWN Development Office.
He is also serving as the Chair of the Technology Working Group at IOWN Global Forum.
He has been working as a bridge between technologies and businesses since he joined NTT in 1994.
His expertise includes high-speed networking, SDN, cloud/edge computing, AI, and data management.
Nowadays, he is exploring innovative ways of realizing digital twin applications leveraging the evolution of optical communication and optoelectronics integration technologies.

As AI infrastructure continues to scale and evolve, optical networks must satisfy increasingly demanding requirements for bandwidth, latency, interoperability, flexibility, and security. These requirements are driving the evolution of photonic systems beyond conventional transport networks toward an open, interoperable, and application-aware infrastructure.
This presentation discusses how open photonic systems can address these emerging AI infrastructure requirements through open architectures, programmable technologies, multi-vendor interoperability, and customer-driven innovation. It also highlights the convergence of computing, networking, and photonics through system-level innovations such as optical SmartNICs, together with the growing importance of security and industry standardization. Drawing on practical development experience and interoperability activities, this presentation illustrates how photonic systems are evolving from traditional transport equipment into a foundational infrastructure that enables efficient, scalable, and future-ready AI systems.

Junichi Sugiyama is a Technology Director at 1FINITY Americas Inc. He has been engaged in the development and system architecture of optical transport systems, including open optical networking, coherent pluggables, multi-vendor interoperability, and secure connectivity. His current interests include photonic systems and programmable network technologies for distributed AI and data center infrastructure.

R&D of hollow core fibers (HCFs) for telecommunication become very active now, since HCFs have many unique properties, which are difficult to achieve with conventional silica-based fibers, including low latency, low loss, low non-linearity or high-power resistance, wide-band, resistance for harsh environment, and so on. However, to use the HCFs as transmission lines, it is essential to improve not only fibers but also peripheral technologies, such as connections and cables. In addition, not only optical properties but also other aspects, such as reliability, performance in the field, and manufacturability also need to be optimized. We will report the recent R&Ds of these technologies.

Kazunori Mukasa joined Furukawa Electric, Chiba, Japan in 1996 and has been mainly investigated new types of transmission fibers. From 2004 to 2006, he worked as a visiting researcher in ORC, University of Southampton in the U.K. From 2012 to 2015, he belonged to OFS Laboratories in the USA, as a visiting researcher. Now, he is a research fellow of Lightera Japan, Mie, Japan, and mainly investigating the next-generation transmission fibers, including innovative silica-based fibers and hollow core fibers.

The rapid growth of AI-driven services and information technologies is accelerating capacity demand in metro optical networks. Multi-band transmission offers a flexible and cost-effective way to expand capacity by utilizing the existing deployed fiber infrastructure. However, nonlinear fiber effects, particularly inter-channel stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS), induce power transfer among wavelengths and cause wavelength-dependent quality-of-transmission (QoT) degradation. Accurate performance estimation is therefore essential for efficient network design and operation.
Here we present an experimental verification of the ISRS GN model [1], a widely used analytical tool for modeling nonlinear interference noise in multi-band optical transmission systems. We designed and implemented a three-node C+L-band transmission experiment. The GSNR estimated by the ISRS GN model was compared with both experimentally measured results and numerical results calculated using the split-step Fourier method (SSFM). The comparison confirmed that the estimation error between the ISRS GN model and the measured results was less than 0.8 dB across the evaluated channels, while also showing good consistency with the SSFM-based calculation. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ISRS GN model for GSNR estimation and support its application to path design and management of future metro multi-band optical networks.

Received a Master of Engineering from Waseda University in 2016.
Joined the System Platform Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation in 2016, engaged in the research and development related to metamaterial antennas for wireless communications.
Currently with the Connected Infrastructure Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation, focusing on the research related to high-capacity optical transmission systems.

Optical networks are becoming increasingly complex as they support cloud services, data centers, distributed AI, and emerging high-capacity applications. In this context, artificial intelligence is moving from a tool for offline analysis toward an active component of optical network operation. This talk reviews recent progress in AI for optical networks, covering optical performance monitoring, telemetry analysis, anomaly detection, failure diagnosis, and optimization of transmission and network parameters. It then discusses the emerging transition from monitoring-oriented AI to agentic control, where AI agents reason over network states, interact with tools and simulators, and propose or execute control actions in closed-loop operation. Particular attention is given to practical constraints such as reliability, reproducibility, data sovereignty, and deployment within secure operational environments. Finally, the talk outlines future directions toward autonomous optical networks, including physics-aware AI, small language model agents, multi-agent control, and trustworthy human-AI collaboration.

Takahito Tanimura is a researcher at Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on networks of LLM/SLM agents, distributed AI, optical communications, digital signal processing, and machine learning for large-scale systems. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from Tokyo Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and information systems from the University of Tokyo. Before joining Hitachi, he worked at Fujitsu Laboratories and was a guest researcher at Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, Germany. He is a Senior Member of IEICE and a member of the Physical Society of Japan.

This presentation introduces an overview of Japan's academic research network, "Science Information NETwork 6 (SINET6)," and outlines the plans for its next-generation successor, SINET7, scheduled to launch in April 2028. Operating since April 2022, SINET6 is a 400-gigabit Ethernet backbone network spanning across Japan with international links to North America, Europe, and Asia. SINET delivers diverse services, such as VPNs, security, and 5G mobile networks. The upcoming SINET7 will upgrade this infrastructure to an 800-gigabit Ethernet-based network.

Takashi Kurimoto is currently a professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. He is actively involved in the design and implementation of the Science Information Network (SINET), Japan's national research and educational network. His research interests and expertise focus on switching technologies for high-speed computer networks and the deployment of next-generation network infrastructures.

The rapid growth of AI services is driving unprecedented demand for scalable, efficient, and flexible optical transport networks. At the same time, open and disaggregated optical networking technologies have significantly expanded deployment flexibility by enabling multi-vendor interoperability and software-driven network control. However, operating such heterogeneous infrastructures efficiently has become increasingly challenging.
This talk reviews the recent evolution of open optical networking technologies and discusses how Optical Network Digital Twin (ONDT) is emerging as a key enabler for AI-native network operations. Recent advances in physical-layer digital modeling, telemetry, and open-source tools such as GNPy will be introduced together with practical field demonstrations and standardization activities.

Dr. Hideki Nishizawa is a Senior Research Engineer at NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Japan. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from Chiba University, Japan, in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He joined NTT Laboratories in 1996, where he has been engaged in research and development of open and disaggregated optical networking technologies and Optical Network Digital Twin (ONDT). He also serves as the Coordinator of the Open APN Task Force in the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum and Co-Leader of the Disaggregated Optical Systems (DOS) Subgroup in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT) Project Group. He received the Ph.D. degree in Information Science and Technology from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 2025. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His current research interests include open optical networking, Optical Network Digital Twins, AI-assisted optical network operations, and multi-vendor interoperability.

Friday 31, July 2026

Special Plenary Address

"International Collaborations Spearheading OpenROADM Multi-Source Agreement Technologies"

Prof. Andrea Fumagalli, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Next-generation network technologies have attracted increasing attention and efforts towards the design of open and disaggregated multi-vendor architectures, currently underway. To have any impact, these efforts must rely on network operators (primarily Mobile Network Operators), equipment vendors, and researchers from all over the world to reach consensus on network functionality models, interfaces, and procedures. Notable examples include OpenROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA), O-RAN Alliance, OpenConfig, and Innovative Optical and Wireless Networks (IOWN) Global Forum. These groups operate on a collaborative, open-source basis rather than being governed by a traditional, formal standards organization. The latter can lead to vendor lock-in due to slight variations in implementation or interpretation of standards.
This presentation will first provide a review of these initiatives, along with the unprecedented benefits that such open-source efforts offer to academia's research and workforce development endeavors. The second part of the presentation will focus on some of the challenges that have slowed progress made by these open-source initiatives toward commercialization, and the investments made in the USA to reach reliable, deployable, and truly open and disaggregated next-generation solutions.

Biography:

Andrea Fumagalli is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and a Laurea Degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy. From 1992 to 1998 he was an Assistant Professor of the Electronics Engineering Department at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He joined UT Dallas as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in August 1997 and was elevated to the rank of Professor in 2005. He served as the Head of the Telecommunications Engineering Program (TE) at UT Dallas from 2007 to 2012. He is an Affiliate Faculty member of Computer Science at UT Dallas and a Guest Professor at Keio University, Keio, Japan.
Dr. Fumagalli's research interests include aspects of optical transport, mobile access, and inter-cloud networks, as well as related protocol design and performance evaluation. He has published over two hundred technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and is a co-recipient of three best paper awards. He is the Founding Director of OpenLab @ UT Dallas (https://openlab.utdallas.edu/) an industry-driven initiative whose aim is to independently validate multi-vendor interoperability, performance, and security of hardware and software according to the open specifications published by the OpenROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and O-RAN Alliance.

The Innovative Optical and Wireless Networks (IOWN) Global Forum, in collaboration with OpenLab @ UT Dallas and the OpenROADM MSA community, supports the development of next-generation telecommunication infrastructure through collaborative live demonstrations focused on multi-domain optical networking. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2026, a federated, multi-vendor and multi-domain optical network architecture was demonstrated live, showcasing recent developments in interoperable, software-defined optical transport systems designed to address specific requirements in data-centric applications (Fig. 1).

Conventional optical transport networks typically depend on manual configuration for wavelength provisioning and cross-connect operations, increasing provisioning latency and operational expenditure. With a continued increase in bandwidth demand driven by artificial intelligence workloads, there is growing interest in dynamic, automated, and interoperable network approaches. The OFC 2026 demonstrations focused on enabling programmable interconnections across independently operated optical transport domains, documenting collaborative outcomes within OpenROADM, the IOWN Global Forum, and OpenLab. A key technical aspect is the alignment of transmission parameters and Quality of Transmission (QoT) between several vendors. Methodologies for inter-domain coordination by a multi-domain orchestrator are investigated to support scalable optical transport networks while maintaining performance and operational constraints.
The testbed at OFC 2026 demonstrated two independent optical domains interconnected using OpenROADMcompliant Reconfigurable Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) from four different vendors. The testbed integrated heterogeneous transport technologies such as IP-over-DWDM (IPoDWDM), Ethernet, and Optical Transport Network (OTN) elements, supporting transmission rates between 25 Gbps and 800 Gbps. End-to-end service creation was enabled through the open-source OpenDaylight-based software-defined network (SDN) controller, Transport- PCE. A hierarchical, microservice-based control architecture was used to support multi-domain orchestration and dynamic resource coordination across independent optical networks. This approach enabled automated service provisioning across multiple domains. The use of open standards such as OpenROADM and vendor-neutral frameworks facilitates interoperability and validation among disaggregated network devices, leading to scalable optical networks. The IOWN Global Forum comprises more than 180 member organizations and contributes to the development of specifications, reference architectures, and use cases for future communication systems. The collaboration between IOWN Global Forum and OpenLab is part of a broader industry ecosystem that pursues multi-domain interoperable optical networks. The reported demonstration corroborates the feasibility of scalable and automated optical networks capable of supporting growing global data traffic demands and emerging multi-domain network applications.

Junichi Kawasaki received M.E. in system engineering from Keio University, Japan, in 2011. He has been engaged in network automation supported by AI/ML technology in KDDI Research, Inc. His current interest is intent-driven autonomous network and network digital twin for intelligent operation.

Toshiya Matsuda received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical information and communication engineering from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 1990 and 1992, respectively. In 1992, he joined the NTT Transmission Systems Laboratories and involved in the research on long-haul large-capacity transmission systems. He is currently a Senior Research Engineer at NTT Network Service Systems Laboratories, Tokyo, where he conducts research on data center networks. He is a Member of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers of Japan.

Hiroyuki Tsuda received a B.S. from Waseda University in Japan in 1985 and an M.E. and a Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan in 1987 and 1998, respectively. He joined NTT Optoelectronics Laboratories in 1987, where he initially conducted research on nonlinear optical devices. From 1994 on, he worked on developing long-haul 10 Gbit/s transmission systems. In 1996, he researched optical signal processing for communication systems using arrayed-waveguide gratings. He also studied the hybrid integration of III-V devices onto CMOS circuits. Since 2000, he has been a professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Keio University. He was also a visiting professor at University College London. His research focuses on optical devices that use silica and silicon waveguides in optical communication systems, in-vehicle networks, and fiber-based network systems. He has published over 100 journal articles and holds multiple patents on optical devices. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan. He is also a member of the IEEE Photonics Society, the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), Optica, the Japan Society of Applied Physics, the Laser Society of Japan, and the Optical Society of Japan.

As communication systems evolve toward beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G networks, low latency, ultra-wide bandwidth, and massive connectivity become essential requirements for advanced applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and high-sensitivity sensing systems. To satisfy these demands, fast switching systems play an important role in dynamically controlling communication channels and allocating network resources. Currently, various switching systems have been proposed based on different operating principles, including MEMS-based, laser-based, and silicon-based switches. However, the switching performance of these systems is fundamentally limited by the response speed of electronic control clocks, which restricts the achievable switching speed. On the other hand, future communication systems require not only fast channel switching but also dynamic time-domain management for flexible network operation. Therefore, software-defined networking (SDN) and time-domain scheduling are becoming increasingly important research topics in future wireless communication systems. In this study, a photonic microwave switch based on phase-locked period-one (P1) nonlinear semiconductor laser dynamics is proposed. The proposed system overcomes the fundamental limitation imposed by electronic control clocks and significantly reduces the microwave frequency switching time through nonlinear dynamic effects. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves a minimum switching time of 220 ps using a 2.5-ns control clock, corresponding to a switching speed approximately 11 times faster than that of the control clock itself. In addition, the switching speed can be flexibly controlled by adjusting the nonlinear dynamics. Furthermore, the proposed system successfully demonstrates 2.5-GHz 16-QAM wireless transmission while preserving good error vector magnitude (EVM) performance. Since FPGA-based architecture serves as a fundamental platform bridging the physical layer and control layer, they play a crucial role in future network management, dynamic scheduling, and SDN-controlled communication systems through programmable generation of arbitrary control clock. In the proposed system, microwave frequency switching can be triggered using only simple electronic control clocks rather than complicated control clock, indicating strong potential for seamless integration with FPGA-assisted network control architectures.

P-1_Fig1

Fig. 3 Summary of the switching time and switching duration under different SCRs.

Hao-Wen Weng Lin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Photonics at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. His research focuses on microwave photonics, nonlinear semiconductor laser dynamics, photonic microwave switch, and fiber–wireless communication systems. His recent work investigates ultrafast photonic microwave switching based on phase-locked period-one dynamics for future 6G mmWave and sub-THz communications.

We conducted a demonstration in a commercial optical fiber network to evaluate automated optical wavelength-path switching without pre-reserved resources, aiming at rapid traffic rerouting during disaster-induced failures.
We constructed an optical transport network interconnecting three geographically distributed data centers in Tokyo, consisting of optical transport equipment, switching equipment with digital coherent optical (DCO) transceivers, a wavelength converter, an IP controller, data transfer servers, and an All-Photonics Network (APN) controller. To enable seamless multi-operator coordination, we applied control-domain separation with fine-grained authority control. This architecture strictly decouples user-managed layer 2/3 functions from provider-managed optical-layer (L1) control required for APN connectivity, eliminating operational complexity. Furthermore, wavelength conversion enabled flexible provisioning even without end-to-end wavelength continuity.
In the test scenario, we emulated a path failure to evaluate the proposed coordinated mechanism. The APN controller automatically designed optimal paths, wavelengths, and transmission methods, calculated a redundant bypass route, and configured new optical paths using wavelength conversion. Concurrently, through inter-controller coordination, the IP controller dynamically acquired path status from the APN controller and autonomously reconfigured the switches to govern traffic distribution. Consequently, we restored all data transfers within 10 minutes and demonstrated on-demand bandwidth expansion. These results indicate that automated multi-operator coordination can significantly reduce recovery time compared with manual operations, improving optical network reliability.

P-2_Fig1

July 2025 - Present: NTT, Inc., Japan
April 2023 - July 2025: NTT EAST, Inc., Japan

The secret sharing scheme (SSS) splits significant information into several pieces (shares), to protect against the attack from hackers. Ref. [1] proposed a model < G, D> to analyze its security strength under the following definitions and conditions.

Moreover, consider the subsets I ⊆ V and S ⊆ V, where a node in I is an 'intrusion gate' and a node in S is a 'shareholder'. A hacker can collect a share if there is a path, but never going through closed domains, between a shareholder and an intrusion gate. P_L is the hacker's probability of success deciphering. Ref. [1] proposed to use P_L as a measure of security strength for G, D>.

Here, we claim that condition 4 is sometimes unreasonable. For example, we sometimes find that if a hacker can access the account of a super-user in UNIX, then s/he also can access every account under this super-user.
Our improved model gives m × m matrix Q consisting of 1s and 0s as its elements and satisfying that if the (a, b)-element of Q is 1, then the hacker can access D_b through D_a.
We demonstrate numerical examples of computing P_L for this improved model, under the assumption that if two domains D_i and D_j satisfy D_j ⊆ D_i, then the (i, j)-element of Q is 1; else 0, and a hacker can decipher the secret information if he collects a specified number of shares.

Graduate Department of Electrical, Electronic and Communication Engineering at Faculty of Science and Engineering, Tokyo City University (2026), and now majoring Informatics at Graduate School of Integrative Science and Engineering, Tokyo City University.

Computations are sometimes tough jobs for scientists and engineers. Therefore, they are often outsourced to subcontractors. However, outsourcing is troublesome because important data used in the target computation, e.g., the customer's private information, might be leaked by the subcontractor. Fully homomorphic encryption, abbreviated as FHE, solves this problem by encrypting sensitive data before it is sent to the subcontractor. The key idea is to find a mapping φ satisfying the following conditions given for two plaintexts m₁ and m₂.

The computation can be outsourced without disclosing the data to the subcontractor by using . For example, if the target computation is 3 + 2 × 4, then we can avoid disclosing 2, 3, and 4 by rather disclosing φ(3), φ(2), and φ(4), because Conditions 1 and 2 guarantee that φ(3) + φ(2) × φ(4) = φ(3 + 2 × 4) = φ(11); thereby, the outsourcing side obtains 11 by applying φ ^{– 1} to φ(11). Many types of FHE have been proposed, the CKKS scheme [1] is in a popular one. However, its struggles with an error growing with the number of additions and multiplications in the computation to be encrypted. While bootstrapping can reset the error in the middle of the computation, its computation time increases exponentially with the number of additions and multiplications. In contrast, the IH method [2] is free of errors but lacks lattice-based security strength. Here, our proposal successfully combines CKKS and IH method by encoding real (or complex) vectors into a polynomial to keep lattice-based security strength, while it execute computations on subcontractor side without bootstrapping by applying the IH method to polynomials.

Graduated Department of Electrical, Electronic and Communication Engineering at Faculty of Science and Engineering, Tokyo City University (2026). Currently a master's student in Informatics at the Graduate School of Integrative Science and Engineering, Tokyo City University.

Special Panel Session

Theme of Special Panel Session: Toward interconnection and collaboration of optical networks
Moderator:

Sugang Xu, NICT, Japan

Biography:

Sugang Xu received the B.E., M.E. degrees in Computer Engineering from Beijing Polytechnic University, Beijing, China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 2002. He joined the Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University, in 2002 as a Research Associate. Since 2005, he joined the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Tokyo, Japan. He has been engaged in research on new-generation network architecture and resilience of photonic networks. He is a member of IEEE and IEICE.

Panelists:

- Tomonori Takeda, NTT, Inc., Japan

Biography:

He received a B.E and M.E. in electronics, information, and communication engineering from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1999 and 2001. He joined NTT the same year and has been engaged in research and development on the next-generation transport network architecture and next-generation mobile network architecture. His research interest includes photonic-based networking, network and compute convergence, and AI-oriented networking.

- Nozomu Takama, NEC Corporation, Japan

Biography:

Nozomu Takama received his B.S. in Control Engineering from Tokai University in 1998. In the same year, he joined NEC Robot Engineering, where he was engaged in the development of systems for generating station data for large-scale carrier home memory exchanges, as well as common operation support systems across wireless, switching, and transmission domains. He also contributed to satellite phone services and the development of one of the earliest smartphones for a major telecom carrier. In 2017, he joined a call center company, where he served as an executive officer. In 2021, he rejoined NEC.
He has extensive experience in telecom systems and network automation across multiple domains. He is currently engaged in the development of network orchestrators while also conducting research on APN (All-Photonics Network) federation, contributing to the evolution of future network architectures. He holds a U.S. patent related to orchestrator technologies.

- Yuki Ban, 1FINITY Inc., Japan

Biography:

Yuki Ban received his B.Eng. degree from the Advanced Course in Electrical and Information Systems Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Kagoshima College, Japan, in 2014. He joined the Network Products Business Unit of Fujitsu Limited in the same year, where he worked as a system engineer on the research and development of long-haul and metro WDM systems. Since July 2025, he has been with the Photonics System Business Unit of 1Finity Inc., where he has been involved in the research and development of distributed ROADM systems.

- Junichi Kawasaki, KDDI Research, Inc., Japan

Mr. Junichi Kawasaki

Biography:

Junichi Kawasaki received his M.E. degree from Keio University in 2011. He joined KDDI Corporation in the same year, where he was engaged in network operations for global enterprise fixed networks. He is currently an Expert at KDDI Research, Inc., focusing on AI-driven network operations, including optical network management and control. He also serves as a Task Force co-leader of DCS (Data-Centric compute and network Service) TF in the IOWN Global Forum, leading the standardization activities on multi-domain IOWN networking.

- Mitsuhiro Kuchitsu, Rakuten Mobile, Inc., Japan

Satoshi Uda

Biography:

Mitsuhiro Kuchitsu has over 15 years of experience in the development and verification of mobile networks. He joined Rakuten Mobile, Inc after working at a telecommunications equipment vendors. At Rakuten Mobile, he was involved in the commercial deployment of multi-vendor 4G/5G virtualized RAN and contributed to the establishment of "Japan OTIC," which operates under the O-RAN ALLIANCE. Currently he oversees the company's Innovation Project Development Division.
As a board member of Japan OTIC, he not only supports the adoption of Open RAN both in Japan and overseas but also leads new R&D projects in NTN, AI, and cloud computing that utilize Open RAN. Furthermore, he is also promoting joint demonstrations aimed at 6G not only with private companies but also with universities in Japan and abroad.

Online Proceedings

Thursday 30, July 2026

Friday 31, July 2026