Young Professionals

Virtual platform will be delivered to registrants a couple of hours before starting the event.  Contact: IEEE Montreal Young Professionals Abstract: Rate Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), based on (linearly or nonlinearly) precoded Rate-Splitting (RS) at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers, has emerged as a novel, general and powerful framework for the design and optimization of non-orthogonal transmission, multiple access, and interference management strategies in future MIMO wireless networks. RSMA relies on the split of messages and the non-orthogonal transmission of common messages decoded by multiple users, and private messages decoded by their corresponding users. This enables RSMA to softly bridge and therefore reconcile the two extreme strategies of fully decode interference and treat interference as noise. RSMA has been shown to generalize, and subsume as special cases, four seemingly different strategies, namely Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) based on linear precoding (currently used in 5G), Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA), Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) based on linearly precoded superposition coding with SIC, and physical-layer multicasting. RSMA boils down to those strategies in some specific conditions, but outperforms them all in general. Through information and communication theoretic analysis, RSMA is shown to be optimal (from a Degrees-of-Freedom region perspective) in a number of scenarios and provides significant room for spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, fairness, reliability, QoS enhancements in a wide range of network loads and user deployments, robustness against imperfect Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT), as well as feedback overhead and complexity reduction over conventional strategies used in 5G. The benefits of RSMA have been demonstrated in a wide range of scenarios (MU-MIMO, massive MIMO, multi-cell MIMO/CoMP, overloaded systems, NOMA, multigroup multicasting, mmwave communications, communications in the presence of RF impairments and superimposed unicast and multicast transmission, relay,…) and systems (terrestrial, cellular, satellite, …). Thanks to its versatility, RSMA has the potential to tackle challenges of modern communication systems and is a gold mine of research problems for academia and industry, spanning fundamental limits, optimization, PHY and MAC layers, and standardization. This lecture will share key principles of RSMA, recent developments, emerging applications and opportunities of RSMA for 6G networks and will cover many of the topics currently investigated as part of the new IEEE special interest group on RSMA https://sites.google.com/view/ieee-comsoc-wtc-sig-rsma/home. Speaker(s): Bruno Clerckx Biography: Bruno Clerckx is a (Full) Professor, the Head of the Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Lab, and the Deputy Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group, within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, London, U.K. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied science from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 2000 and 2005, respectively. From 2006 to 2011, he was with Samsung Electronics, Suwon, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m) and acted as the Rapporteur for the 3GPP Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) Study Item. Since 2011, he has been with Imperial College London, first as a Lecturer from 2011 to 2015, Senior Lecturer from 2015 to 2017, Reader from 2017 to 2020, and now as a Full Professor. From 2014 to 2016, he also was an Associate Professor with Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. He also held various long or short-term visiting research appointments at Stanford University, EURECOM, National University of Singapore, The University of Hong Kong, Princeton University, The University of Edinburgh, The University of New South Wales, and Tsinghua University.

Note: Virtual platform will be delivered to registrants a couple of hours before starting the event. Contact: IEEE Montreal Section Young Professionals Abstract: The number of devices requesting for wireless communications is growing exponentially. Network densification via the deployment of many base stations (BSs) of different types is one of the mechanisms that can be employed to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth/capacity in wireless networks. However, deploying fiber to the small cells may be expensive and impractical when the number of small cells increases. For this reason, as well as because of the traffic jams and infrastructure displacements caused by fiber optic installation, millimeter wave (mmw)-based wireless backhaul is currently considered as an alternative, providing (almost) the same rate as fiber optic with significantly less price and no digging. With this background, integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks, where the operator can utilize part of the radio resources for wireless backhauling, has recently received considerable attention. The purpose of IAB is to replace existing backhaul systems with flexible wireless backhaul using the existing 3GPP bands providing not only backhaul but also existing cellular services in the same node. This creates more flexibility and reduces the implementation cost. For 5G NR, IAB is currently considered as a work item in 3GPP, and it is known as one of the main novelties of 5G. In this talk, we review the main backhauling techniques, and present the main motivations/standardization agreements on IAB. Moreover, We present comparisons between the IAB networks and the cases where all or part of the small access points are fiber-connected. Finally, we study the robustness of IAB networks to environmental effects and verify the effect of the blockage, the tree foliage, the rain as well as the antenna height/gain on the coverage rate of IAB setups, as the key differences between the fiber-connected and IAB networks. As we show, IAB is an attractive setup enabling 5G and beyond.

The exploitation of the THz band is expected to catalyze 6G applications, as a solution to both wireless backhaul and fronthaul, and integrated backhaul/fronthaul applications. However, the utilization of THz wireless technologies comes with several challenges, mainly associated with the very high propagation losses in the THz regime, which require the utilization of high-gain directional antennas with strict beam alignment requirements, and with challenging blockage scenarios, which call for intelligent beam steering and blockage avoidance based medium access and resource allocation. In this talk, we first discuss critical usage scenarios and significant technology pillars defining the THz Wireless system concept. Then, a quantitative assessment of intelligent pencil beamforming wireless access technologies is presented, along with the impact of beam misalignment and blockage. Finally, the benefits of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces are reported and their expected role in future THz wireless systems is discussed. Speaker(s): Angeliki Alexiou, Gunes Karabulut Kurt Agenda: 11:55 AM - 12:00: Workshop opening by Mansour Naslcheraghi, Chair of YP Montreal 12:00 AM - 12:05: Terahertz Days workshop series introduction and speaker introduction by chair of Terahertz Days, Dr. Gunes Karabulut Kurt 12:05 AM - 12:50: Talk by Prof. Angeliki Alexiou 12:50 AM - 01:00 or more (depending on speaker's availability): Q & A session Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/285255

Event to introduce the 3GPP standardization process and discuss the existing and future specifications for 5G New Radio. The fifth and latest generation of cellular mobile communication protocols (5G) is meant to address use cases well beyond the next decade. The first set of technical specifications for 5G, also referred to as “New Radio” or NR in 3GPP, were completed as part of 3GPP Release 15. The standardization work for 5G NR continues and new features are continuously added to address more advanced use cases and verticals. This presentation will provide an overview of the standardization process in 3GPP and an overview of the technical features for Release 16 and Release 17 of the specifications. The presentation will conclude with an outlook of future wireless evolution. Speaker(s): Benoît Pelletier, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Join MathWorks and IEEE to learn Deep-Learning Seminar. Dr. Aycan Hacioglu (MathWorks) will demonstrate how to manage, automated labelling and augment large data sets. We will also show you how to leverage pre-trained models such as GoogLeNet, ResNet for transfer learning and more! Co-sponsored by: Vancouver Section Affinity Group,YP Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/314598

Starlink orbits at about 550km, which results in lower latency, in comparison to GEO satellites which orbit around 35,786km. Each satellite features a compact, flat-panel design that minimizes volume, allowing for a dense launch stack to take full advantage of the launch capabilities of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. join us to learn more about Starlink Speaker(s): Tim Belfall Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/360280