Lecturers
Prof. George Alexandropoulos (Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
Prof. George C. Alexandropoulos received the Engineering Diploma, M.A.Sc. (with distinction), and Ph.D. (best Ph.D. thesis award) degrees in computer engineering and informatics from the University of Patras, Greece in 2003, 2005, and 2010, respectively. He has held research positions at various Greek universities and research institutes, as well as at the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab, Paris Research Center, Huawei Technologies France, and he is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Greece. His research interests span the general areas of algorithmic design and performance analysis for wireless networks with emphasis on multi-antenna transceiver hardware architectures, active and passive reconfigurable metasurfaces, millimeter wave communications, as well as distributed machine learning algorithms. He has received the best Ph.D. Thesis Award 2010, the IEEE Communications Society Best Young Professional in Industry Award 2018, the EURASIP Best Paper Award of the Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2021, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications 2021, and a Best Paper Award from the IEEE GLOBECOM 2021. For the period 2022-2023, he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE ComSoc, with the technology of RISs being one of his lectureship topics. More information is available in www.alexandropoulos.info.
Prof. Henk Wymeersch (Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Prof. Henk Wymeersch obtained the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering/Applied Sciences in 2005 from Ghent University, Belgium. He is currently a Professor of Communication Systems with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He is also a Distinguished Research Associate with Eindhoven University of Technology. Prior to joining Chalmers, he was a postdoctoral researcher from 2005 until 2009 with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Wymeersch served as Associate Editor for IEEE Communication Letters (2009-2013), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (since 2013), and IEEE Transactions on Communications (2016-2018). During 2019-2021, he was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer with the Vehicular Technology Society. His current research interests include the convergence of communication and sensing, in a 5G and Beyond 5G context. More information is available in https://sites.google.com/site/hwymeers/Home.
Dr. Kamran Keykhoshravi (Ericsson Research, Sweden)
Dr. Kamran Keykhosravi received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He obtained the Ph.D. degree with the Communication Systems Group, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 2019. His Ph.D research focus was on Information-Theoretical analysis of non-linear fiber-optical channel, and also optical networks. After a short stint at QAMCOM, he rejoined Chalmers as a postdoc in the RISE- 6G project, leading activities related to RIS-based localization and sensing. Since May 2022, he is with Ericsson Research, Sweden.
Abstract
The tutorial has the following four core objectives: 1) To detail the various available hardware architectures for RISs, their available modeling approaches, and their implications in the design of RIS-enabled localization and sensing systems and schemes; 2) To discuss how RIS-enabled smart wireless environments can boost or enable localization; 3) To detail how RISs can support sensing and radar applications beyond the ability provided by 5G and earlier generations; and 4) To present simultaneous localization and mapping techniques leveraging programmable signal reflections.
Motivation and Context
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are artificial planar structures with integrated electronic circuits that can be programmed to manipulate an incoming ElectroMagnetic (EM) field in a customizable way. RISs exhibit a wide variety of EM functionalities, ranging from perfect and controllable absorption, beam and wavefront shaping to polarization control, broadband pulse delay, and harmonic generation. There have been recently increased interests on the RIS technology for performance boosting, or enabling, various 5G and beyond applications. The ongoing EU funded H2020 ICT-52 projects RISE-6G (https://rise-6g.eu) and Hexa-X (https://www.hexa-x.eu), where the tutorial proposers are key participants, are among the first projects on RIS-empowered smart wireless environments to investigate the trade-offs and synergies of communication and localization in a beyond 5G context.
Motivation: The aforementioned research and innovation projects, in combination with the increased attention to joint radar and communication approaches and systems from both academia and industry, have been the main motivation for this tutorial proposal. Therefore, the tutorial will focus explicitly on the potential of RIS-enabled smart wireless environments for localization and sensing, emphasizing on their joint operation and the key resulting opportunities for beyond 5G wireless networks. In contrast to the plethora of tutorials on RISs, this tutorial is unique as it focuses on localization and sensing, both separately and as simultaneous operations, rather than on communications.
Objectives: The tutorial has the following four core objectives: 1) To detail the various available hardware architectures for RISs, their available modeling approaches, and their implications in the design of RIS-enabled localization and sensing systems and schemes; 2) To discuss how RIS-enabled smart wireless environments can boost or enable localization; 3) To detail how RISs can support sensing and radar applications beyond the ability provided by 5G and earlier generations; and 4) To present simultaneous localization and mapping techniques leveraging programmable signal reflections.
Structure and Content
The outline of the content of the proposed half-day tutorial, including its tentative schedule, is the following:
Part I: Foundations of RIS
- Fundamentals on RISs
- RIS Hardware Architectures
- Use Cases and Network Architectures
- RIS Control and Optimization
- Relevance to Standards and Open Challenges
Part II: Foundations of Localization and Sensing
- Foundations of Radio Localization and Sensing
- Localization and Sensing in 6G: Visions and Trends
- Models, Methods, and Bounds
- Case study I: 5G Localization
- Case study II: FMCW Radar Sensing
Part III: RIS-Empowered Localization and Sensing
- Principles and Examples of RIS-Boosted Localization
- Principles and Examples of RIS-Enabled Localization
- Principles and Examples of RIS-Enabled Radar
Part IV: Advanced Topics
- RIS-Based SLAM
- Multi-User, Multi-RIS, Mobility, Hardware Effects
- What are the important research gaps (includes option for open discussion)
Schedule: The duration of each part is equal to 45 minutes: Part I will be presented by Prof. Alexandropoulos, Part II will be presented by Prof. Wymeersch, and Part III by Dr. Keykhoshravi. Advanced topics in Part IV will be presented by all 3 authors. The concluding remarks will last for 5 minutes, and the last 20 min of the tutorial will be devoted to asking/answering questions. The tutorial is suitable for both physical and virtual presentations.