Friday, September 16, 2022
10:20 – 11:10 a.m. (CST)
Virtual via Zoom: https://tamu.zoom.us/j/93347193479 (password in emails or syllabus)
Dr. Joerg Widmer
Research Professor and Research Director of IMDEA Networks
Madrid, Spain
Title: “Millimeter-Wave Joint Communication and Sensing and Location-based Network Control”
Talking Points:
- Practical challenges of millimeter-wave communications
- Benefits of millimeter-wave frequencies for high-precision sensing and localization
Abstract
The high bandwidth available at millimeter-wave frequencies allows for very high data rates, and the latest wireless technologies already exploit this part of the radio spectrum to achieve rates of several GBit/s per user. Communication at these frequencies typically uses directional antennas which brings about interesting challenges to align antenna beams. Given the high penetration loss, most obstacles (e.g., a person) also completely block the signal. This results in a very dynamic radio environment and channels may appear and disappear over very short time intervals. This seminar highlights some approaches to deal with these networking challenges. The very large bandwidth available at mm-wave frequencies also allows to design highly accurate location systems, and such location information be used to facilitate beam training, optimize access point association, and predict future blockage. We discuss how to implement such millimeter-wave location systems and present network optimization mechanisms based on simultaneous localization and mapping of the environment.
Finally, the information about the wireless channel of millimeter-wave systems can also be used for highly accurate environment sensing. We discuss how to use communication hardware to perform zero-cost monitoring of human movement and activities in indoor spaces (rather than using dedicated radars). We show that access points can be retrofitted to perform radar-like extraction of the micro-Doppler effects caused by the motion of multiple human subjects. We then use this to achieve fine-grained sensing applications such as simultaneous activity recognition and person identification. We will specifically focus on the practical implementation aspects, testbed design and experimental results with such systems.
Biography
Dr. Joerg Widmer is a Research Professor and Research Director of IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. Before, he held positions at DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, Germany and EPFL, Switzerland. He was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, USA, University College London, UK, and TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. Joerg Widmer authored more than 200 conference and journal papers and three IETF RFCs, and holds 14 patents. He was awarded an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Mercator Fellowship of the German Research Foundation, a Spanish Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as nine best paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow and Distinguished Member of the ACM.
More Info on Dr. Widmer at: https://networks.imdea.org/team/imdea-networks-team/people/joerg-widmer/
More info. on past and future CESG Seminars at CESG Seminars (tamu.edu)
Please join on Friday, 9/16/22 at 10:20 a.m. via Zoom.