IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
12–15 September 2022 // Virtual Conference

Panel 06: Short range communication and sensing in 6G: How much better can we do than today’s WiFi?

Thursday 15 September, 14:30-16:00 (UTC+9)

Abstract

6G is believed to continue transforming from connected people, connected things, to connected intelligence. Applications such as immersive interactions, machine collaboration in unmanned factories, smart healthcare with real-time body sensing, and autonomous driving are now being pursued actively and will hopefully be deployed on a large scale during the next decade. This will lead to significantly higher requirements on network performance, such as Tbit/s communication rates and millimeter-level sensing precision at the same time, especially for short to middle range scenarios. To enable these promising applications in short to middle range scenarios, it is necessary to review the technical challenges brought up by these new applications, and investigate potential solutions, from both communication and sensing perspective. There are huge bandwidth available at millimeter-wave, terahertz, and visual light spectrum, which makes them suitable for ultra-high-speed communication and ultra-high-precision sensing in short to middle range scenarios. However, short/middle-range applications are often senstive to complexity, cost, and power consumption, with which the existing air-interface and network architecture may not be suitable, and there are still serious bottlenecks on components, circuits, and chips at these frequency bands, such as manufacturing cost and power efficiency. It is of great interests to investigate solutions that can faciliate short/middle-range communication and sensing in 6G, including but not limited to innovative design on air interface, fundamental breakthrough on network architecture, high accuracy positioning/sensing, imaging with THz, as well as hardware and component design for 6G terminals.

Questions

  1. Potential killer applications that require 6G short/middle-range communication and sensing.
  2. Key technology challenges for 6G short/middle-range communication and sensing.
  3. Potential changes to air interface and network architecture to facilitate 6G short/middle-range communication and sensing.
  4. Key challenges on hardware costs and power consumption for 6G short/middle-range communication and sensing, and potential solutions.

Moderator

Peiying Zhu (Senior Vice President of Wireless Research, Huawei Technologies, Canada)

List of Panelists

Thomas Kaiser (Full Professor, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Harald Haas (Chair of Mobile Communications and Director of the LiFi Research and Development Center, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Kenichi Okada (Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)

Zhi Chen (Professor, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China)

Edward Au (Chair of IEEE 802.18,Senior Principal Engineer, Huawei Technologies, Canada)

Biographies

Peiying Zhu (Fellow, IEEE), Senior Vice President of Wireless Research, a Huawei Fellow, IEEE Fellow and Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is currently leading 5G and beyond wireless research and standardization in Huawei. The focus of her research is advanced radio access technologies. She is actively involved in 3GPP and IEEE 802 standards development. She has been regularly giving talks and panel discussions on 5G vision and enabling technologies. She led the team to contribute significantly to 5G technologies. Prior to joining Huawei in 2009, Peiying was a Nortel Fellow and Director of Advanced Wireless Access Technology in the Nortel Wireless Technology Lab. She led the team and pioneered research and prototyping on MIMO-OFDM and Multi-hop relay. Many of these technologies developed by the team have been adopted into LTE standards and 4G products. Dr. Zhu has more than 200 granted patents.

Thomas Kaiser received his PhD degree in 1995 and habilitation degree in 2001 and from 2002 to 2006 he co-leaded Europe’s largest MIMO research team at University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2005 and 2007, he was visiting professor in Stanford’s Smart Antenna Research Group and Princeton’s EE department, respectively, and from 2006 to 2011 he headed the Institute of Communication Technology at Leibniz University of Hannover. Since 2011 he leads the Institute of Digital Signal Processing at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Thomas is founder of three start-up companies and published more than 300 papers and book chapters. Dr. Kaiser was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the e-letter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on UltraWideBand in 2008, the International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications in 2009, the IEEE Workshop on Cellular Cognitive Systems in 2014, and the IEEE Workshop Series on Mobile Terahertz Systems started in 2018.

Harald Haas (FREng, FRSE, FIEEE, FIET), received the PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. He is a Distinguished Professor of Mobile Communications at the University of Strathclyde and the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Centre. He also set-up and co-founded pureLiFi Ltd which it currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer. Professor Haas main research interests are in optical wireless communications, hybrid optical wireless and RF communications, spatial modulation, and interference coordination in wireless networks. And He has authored over 550 conference and journal papers in these fields. His team invented spatial modulation. He introduced LiFi to the public at an invited TED Global talk in 2011. LiFi was listed among the 50 best inventions in TIME Magazine in 2011. He gave a second TED Global lecture in 2015 on the use of solar cells as LiFi data detectors and energy harvesters. In 2016, he received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Solid State Lighting Alliance. In 2019 he was recipient of IEEE Vehicular Society James Evans Avant Garde Award. Haas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) in 2017. In the same year he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and was elevated to IEEE Fellow. In 2018 he received a three-year EPSRC Established Career Fellowship extension and was elected Fellow of the IET. Haas was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2019.

Kenichi Okada (Senior Member, IEEE), professor of electrical and electronic engineering in Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has authored or coauthored more than 400 journal articles and conference papers. His current research interests include mmWave CMOS wireless transceivers for 20/28/39/60/77/79/100/300 GHz for 5G, WiGig, satellite and future 6G wireless systems, digital PLL, synthesizable PLL, atomic clock, and ultra-low-power wireless transceivers for Bluetooth low-energy and sub-GHz applications. Prof. Okada is/was a member of the Technical Program Committees of the IEEE ISSCC, the VLSI Circuits Symposium, the ESSCIRC, and the RFIC. He is also a member of the IEICE, the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), and the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). He was a recipient or co-recipient of the Ericsson Young Scientist Award in 2004, the IEEE A-SSCC Outstanding Design Awards in 2006 and 2011, the ASP-DAC Special Feature Award in 2011, Best Design Awards in 2014 and 2015, the MEXT Young Scientists’ Prize in 2011, the JSPS Prize in 2014, the Suematsu Yasuharu Award in 2015, the MEXT Prizes for Science and Technology in 2017, the RFIT Best Paper Award in 2017, the IEICE Best Paper Award in 2018, the RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award in 2019, the IEICE Achievement Award in 2019, the DOCOMO Mobile Science Award in 2019, the IEEE/ACM ASP-DAC, the Prolific Author Award in 2020, the Kenjiro Takayanagi Achievement Award in 2020, the KDDI Foundation Award in 2020, the IEEE CICC, Best Paper Award in 2020, and more than 50 other international and domestic awards. He is/was also a Guest Editor and an Associate Editor of IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS (JSSC), an Associate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES (T-MTT), and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS).

Zhi Chen is from the National Key Lab of Science and Technology on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). He is the deputy director of Key Laboratory of Terahertz Technology, Ministry of Education. He is also the Terahertz working chair of China IMT2030 6G Promotion Group. Prof.Zhi Chen is author or co-author of more than 200 technical papers. His current research interests include Terahertz Band Communication, 5G/6G Mobile Communications.

Edward Au (Senior Member, IEEE) is currently a Senior Principal Engineer with Huawei Technologies Canada, where he works on product certification, test bed development, and standardization of Wi-Fi. He has actively participated in standardization organizations and industry forums. Dr. Au was awarded the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology Top Editor Award in recognition of outstanding performance for articles reviews in both quantity and quality for the journal, in 2013 and 2016. He is the founding Chair of the IEEE 802.11 Task Group AY, which is aimed at developing an amendment for next-generation unlicensed millimeter wave technologies for Wi-Fi, and a Co-Editor of the IEEE 802.11 Task Group MD, which is charted to develop amendments for the IEEE 802.11 standards. He is also the Chair of Policies and Procedures of the IEEE Computer Society Standards Activities Board and a member of the IEEE Educational Activities Board/Standards Association Standards Education Committee. He also serves as a Senior Editor for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine and an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He was also an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, a leading Guest Editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine on a few occasions and a Lead Track/Tutorial/Industry Forum Co-Chair of multiple IEEE-sponsored conferences.