Keynote Speakers
Prof. Yonghui Li
IEEE Fellow
The University of Sydney, Australia
Yonghui
Li (M'04-SM'09-F19) is a Professor and Director of
Wireless Engineering Laboratory in School of Electrical and
Information Engineering, University of Sydney. He is the
recipient of the prestigious Australian Research Council
(ARC) Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship in 2008 and the
Australian Future Fellowship in 2012. He is a Fellow of
IEEE. He participated in the world first national smart grid
trial, the $500million Australian Smart Grid Smart City
demonstration project.
His current research interests are in the area of wireless
communications, with a particular focus on MIMO, millimeter
wave communications, machine to machine communications,
coding techniques and cooperative communications. He is now
an editor for IEEE transactions on communications, IEEE
transactions on vehicular technology. He also served as the
guest editor for several IEEE journals, such as IEEE JSAC,
IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE IoT journal, IEEE Access.
He received the best paper awards from IEEE International
Conference on Communications (ICC) 2014, IEEE PIRMC 2017 and
IEEE Wireless Days Conferences (WD) 2014.
Speech Title: 5G IoT Networks: from Massive Access to uRLLC
Abstract: Connected smart objects, platforms and environments have been
identified as the next big technology development, enabling
significant society changes and economic growth. The entire
physical world will be connected to the Internet, referred
to as Internet of Things (IoT). The intelligent IoT network
for automatic interaction and processing between objects and
environments will become an inherent part of areas such as
electricity, transportation, industrial control, utilities
management, healthcare, water resources management and
mining. Wireless networks are one of the key enabling
technologies of the IoT. They are likely to be universally
used for last mile connectivity due to their flexibility,
scalability and cost effectiveness. The attributes and
traffic models of IoT networks are essentially different
from those of conventional communication systems, which are
designed to transmit voice, data and multimedia. IoT access
networks face many unique challenges that cannot be
addressed by existing network protocols; these include
support for a truly massive number of devices, the
transmission of huge volumes of data burst in large-scale
networks over limited bandwidth, and the ability to
accommodate diverse traffic patterns and quality of service
(QoS) requirements. Some IoT applications have much
stringent latency and reliability requirements which cannot
be accommodated by existing wireless networks. Addressing
these challenges requires the development of new wireless
access technologies, underlying network protocols, signal
processing techniques and security protocols. In this talk,
I will present the IoT network development, architecture,
key challenges, requirements, potential solutions and recent
research progress in this area, particularly in 5G.
Prof. Rui Zhang
IEEE Fellow
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Dr. Rui
Zhang received the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University
in electrical engineering in 2007. He is now a Professor in
the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
National University of Singapore. His current research
interests include wireless power transfer, UAV
communication, and reconfigurable MIMO. He has published
over 400 papers, which have been cited more than 40,000
times with h-index over 100. He has been listed as a Highly
Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics
since 2015. His works have received several IEEE awards,
including the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless
Communications (in both 2015 and 2020), the IEEE
Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award (in
both 2017 and 2020), the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best
Paper Award, Young Author Best Paper Award and Donald G.
Fink Overview Paper Award. He has served as an Editor for
several IEEE journals, including TWC, TCOM, JSAC, TSP, TGCN,
etc., and as TPC co-chair or organizing committee member for
over 30 international conferences. He is an IEEE
Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society and
IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Speech Title: Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Radio Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Networks
Abstract: Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has recently
emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier
with the goal of achieving smart and reconfigurable radio
propagation environment for the future wireless networks via
passive and tunable signal reflections. Featured by
orders-of-magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than
traditional active arrays and yet superior beamforming
performance as well as other new functionalities, IRS is
expected to be a key driving technology for B5G/6G wireless
networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher
frequency bands (mmWave/THz). More importantly, IRS will
fundamentally reshape today’s wireless network with active
nodes solely to a new IRS-aided hybrid network comprising
both active and passive components co-working in an
intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity
growth with low and affordable cost in the future. In this
talk, we will provide an overview of IRS, including its
motivations, promising applications in wireless network,
communication basics, new design challenges, and their
state-of-the-art solutions. Important directions worthy of
further investigation such as multi-IRS aided networks will
also be discussed.
Prof. Moshe Zukerman
IEEE Fellow
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Prof. Moshe Zukerman is a Chair
Professor of Information Engineering in the Electronic
Engineering Department of City University of Hong-Kong. His
research focuses on performance evaluation, resource
allocation and survivable design of telecommunications
networks and systems. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees
from the Technion, Israel and a Ph.D. degree from UCLA in
1985. During 1986-1997 he was with Telstra Research
Laboratories and during 1997-2008 with The University of
Melbourne. He has served on editorial boards of various
journals and on technical and organizing committees of
numerous conferences. He has over 350 publications in
scientific journals and conference proceedings. He is a
Fellow of the IEEE.
Speech Title: Designing Networks for Resilience and Cost Effectiveness
Abstract: Two primary objectives in telecommunications
network design are resilience and cost effectiveness. With
our dependence on the Internet, its resilience is
increasingly crucial to humanity as its failure has grave
socio-economic consequences. Cost effectiveness is not only
important because of the need to be profitable and
competitive, but also because of the societal need to
conserve energy and combat global warming. Two important
characteristics of the Internet are long haul cables that
provide efficient communication between different continents
and protocols that are structured in layers. This
presentation will discuss methodologies for optimizing
network design to achieve resilience as well as cost
effectiveness considering optimal cable path planning and
multilayered networks. The importance of cable path planning
optimization lies in the fact that there are now over a
million kilometers of internet cables and with plans for
additional million kilometers of cables to be laid in the
next decade, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, to
meet the overgrowing traffic demand generated by new
technologies and services. As the complexity of the internet
protocols increases with the introduction of new
technologies, the multi-layering characteristics of such
protocols are here to stay. Therefore, network design
optimization and the understanding the tradeoffs between
cost and resilience is key for cost savings and viability of
the internet. Special consideration must be given to
realistic conditions and scale applicable of both internet
cabling and protocol design. Solutions that address these
problems and issues will be presented and discussed in this
presentation. This work was funded by HK RGC grants
CityU123012, CityU11200417 and CityU8/CRF/13G.