IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking
11-13 June 2018 – Hong Kong

Keynotes

Keynotes

 

We are fortunate to welcome with three keynotes in this workshop:

David Gesbert (Eurecom Sophia Antipolis)

Rui Zhang        (National University of Singapore)

Jeroen Wigard (Research Manager at Nokia Bell Labs)

 

Keynote I:

Autonomous flying radio access network (Fly-RANs)

The use of flying robots (drones) carrying radio transceiver equipment is the new promising frontier in our quest towards ever more flexible, adaptable and spectrally efficient wireless networks. Beyond obvious challenges within regulatory, control, navigation, and operational domains, the deployment of autonomous flying radio access network (Fly-RANs) also come with a number of exciting new research problems such as the issue of autonomous real-time placement of the drones in non-trivial propagation scenarios (i.e. scenarios where the optimal placement is not just dictated by a trivial geometry or statistical argument due to shadowing effects, e.g. in cities). We present several different approaches, lying at the cross-roads between machine learning, signal processing and optimization. Some approaches involve the reconstruction of a city map from sampled radio measurements which can have application beyond the realm of communications.

Bio: David Gesbert (IEEE Fellow) is Professor and Head of the Communication Systems Department, EURECOM. He obtained the Ph.D degree from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, France, in 1997. From 1997 to 1999 he has been with the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University. He was then a founding engineer of Iospan Wireless Inc, a Stanford spin off pioneering MIMO-OFDM (now Intel). Before joining EURECOM in 2004, he has been with the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo as an adjunct professor. D. Gesbert has published about 270 papers and 25 patents, some of them winning the 20015 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2012 SPS Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, 2004 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2005 Young Author Best Paper Award for Signal Proc. Society journals, and paper awards at conferences 2011 IEEE SPAWC, 2004 ACM MSWiM. Since 2015, he holds the ERC Advanced grant “PERFUME” on the topic of smart device Communications in future wireless networks.


Keynote II:

5G & Beyond: Embracing the New Era of Internet-of-Drones (IoD)

The past few years have witnessed a tremendous increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in various civilian applications, such as for aerial surveillance, traffic control, photography, package delivery, and communication platforms. Despite their widespread applications, how to enable high-capacity, low-latency and ultra-reliable wireless communications between UAVs and their associated ground entities is still an open challenge. Cellular-connected UAVs is a promising solution to achieve this goal, by integrating UAVs as new aerial users in the existing and future cellular networks. On one hand, cellular‐connected UAVs are expected to achieve orders‐of‐magnitude performance improvement over the existing direct ground-to-UAV communications, in terms of reliability, security, operation range, and throughput. On the other hand, the integration of UAVs into 5G-and-beyond wireless systems calls for a paradigm shift on the design of traditional cellular networks, to enable a highly heterogeneous network architecture with coexisting terrestrial and UAV users. In this talk, we will provide a comprehensive overview of the potential applications, networking architectures, the latest research findings and key enabling technologies for cellular-connected UAV communications, to embrace a forthcoming new era of Internet-of-Drones (IoD).

Bio: Rui Zhang (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.Eng. (First-Class Hons.) and M.Eng. degrees from National University of Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA, all in electrical engineering. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a Research Scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research, ASTAR, Singapore. Since 2010, he has joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National University of Singapore, where he is now a Dean’s  Chair Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering. His current research interests include UAV communications, wireless information and power transfer, MIMO communications, etc. He has published over 300 papers, which have been cited more than 21,000 times. He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters since 2015. He was the recipient of the 6th IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, and the Young Researcher Award of National University of Singapore in 2015. He was the co-recipient of the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2015, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, the IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award in 2017, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award in 2017.


Keynote III:

Enabling reliable communications for aerial vehicles through cellular networks

Due to safety concerns, a reliable radio communication link is a key component in the future application of aerial vehicles, as it will enable beyond visual line-of-sight operations, opening new and attractive use cases. In terms of cost and deployment time, radio communication for aerial vehicles will greatly benefit from the ready to market infrastructure and ubiquitous coverage of cellular networks.  However cellular networks are optimized for terrestrial users, and the different propagation environment experienced by aerial vehicles poses some interference challenges, as has been shown by measurements in live LTE networks. In the downlink this means it is difficult to provide a reliable radio communication link at times of medium or high network load. In the uplink high throughput application communications from an aerial vehicle may disturb the uplink of the users in a wide area. System level simulations are used to assess interference mitigation solutions that can improve aerial link reliability. They show that practical, and relatively low complexity, interference mitigation techniques such as interference coordination, beam steering and hybrid access may well lead to a reliable C2 link even in highly loaded cellular networks in urban and rural areas. These solutions are compared to using a dedicated carrier deployment scenario for aerial vehicles.

Bio: JEROEN WIGARD received the M.Sc. degree electrical engineering from Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands, in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree on the topic of handover algorithms and frequency planning in frequency hopping GSM networks from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 1999. He joined Nokia Aalborg, Denmark, where he was on radio resource management related topics for 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. He also has been studying several network deployment aspects related to LTE network evolution. He is currently with the Nokia Denmark Bell Labs, Aalborg (former Nokia Networks Aalborg) and involved in several IoT related topics, including drones and related connectivity issues. He has authored and co-authored over 40 journal and conference papers.