Title:Sensing and Communications – From competition to cooperation 
Speaker:Prof. Marco Lops(IEEE Fellow)
Affiliation:Università di Napoli “Federico II”

Abstract:The quest for larger and larger communication rates in wireless networks has pushed their carrier frequencies towards bandwidths traditionally assigned to sensing. As a consequence, research has focused – in the last 15 years or so – on several possible strategies to allow Sensing and Communications (S&C) to be both undertaken: initial studies only concerned interference mitigation techniques with scant or no cooperation between two active transmitters, but this soon evolved in more sophisticated philosophies wherein deeper and deeper cooperative transmit policies have been proposed. On a parallel track, research also envisioned functional duality as a viable solution to S&C problem: the basic idea is that a unique transmitter is used, which may be designed in order to accommodate both functions, thus realizing Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) architectures. At an intermediate integration level we find opportunistic systems, wherein communications signals – typically in the mmWave bandwidth – are exploited to undertake short-range sensing and radar returns are used as carriers to establish communication links.

This talk explores some fundamental results concerning spectrum-sharing architectures, and in particular some enabling technologies – primarily Massive MIMO – allowing S&C coexistence. Also, in the spirit of emphasizing impact-less and green solutions, the talk reviews some recently developed techniques to undertake sensing/imaging through communication signals and the dual paradigm of establishing communication links by exploiting radar-generated reverberation (clutter).

Biograph:

Marco Lops (Fellow, IEEE) received the Laurea and Ph.D. degree from “Federico II” University. He was Assistant (1989-1991) Associate (1991-2000) Professor with the University of Naples Federico II. In March 2000, he moved to the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio as a Full Professor and he returned to the University of Naples Federico II in 2018. From 2009 to 2012, he was also with ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France, first as a Full Professor (on leave of absence from Italy) and then as a Visiting Professor. In Fall 2008, he was a Visiting Professor with the University of Minnesota and, in 2009, with Columbia University. Previously, he had also held visiting positions with the University of Connecticut, Rice University, and Princeton University. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Information Technology (DIETI), University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific papers published on refereed journals. His research interests include detection and estimation, with emphasis on communications and radar signal processing. He was a co-recipient (with Ezio Biglieri) of the 2014 Best Paper Award from the Journal of Communications and Networks. From 2009 to 2015, he served two terms for the Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee (SAM). He has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Communications and Networks, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY (Area: Detection and Estimation, two terms), IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING (two terms). He also served as a Senior Area Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING. He was selected to serve as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society from 2018 to 2020.