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Plenary Talk #1: Overview of Energy Efficient Signal Processing for Millimetre Wave Communications. [Talk #1 Slides] Speaker: John Thompson, School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh. Date: September 14th, 9:30-10:30 Abstract: Millimetre wave frequency bands in the range of 30-300 GHz have recently drawn significant attention for use in future fifth generation wireless communications systems. These frequencies are suitable for high speed backhaul links to wireless base stations and may also be employed in fixed broadband connections and mobile communications in future. However, these higher frequency bands also suffer from increased path-loss effects and hardware implementations are challenging due to the high bandwidths that may be used. The use of large antenna arrays is one solution to try to tackle channel effects and provide improved performance. One approach to improve energy efficiency is to use low resolution analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters, e.g. sampling at 1-3 bits/sample. We discuss approaches to try to optimize energy efficiency at the transmitter side of the large antenna array system. Minimising the performance losses in channel estimation is also a key problem in large antenna arrays, so we describe efficient approaches to this problem with limited resolution sampling. Together these methods can help to enable wideband transceivers for use in millimetre wave frequencies. |
Bio: John Thompson currently holds a personal chair in Signal Processing and Communications in University of Edinburgh, UK. His main research interests are in wireless communications, sensor signal processing and energy efficient communications networks and smart grids. He has published around 300 papers in these topics and was recognised by Thomson Reuters as a highly cited researcher in 2015 and 2016. He also currently leads the European Marie Curie Training Network ADVANTAGE which trains 13 PhD students in Smart Grids. He was a distinguished lecturer on green topics for ComSoc in 2014-2015. He is also currently an editor of the Green Series of IEEE Communications Magazine and an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networks.
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Plenary Talk #2: Information-Theoretic Security in the Smart Grid. [Talk #2 Slides] Speaker: Iñaki Esnaola, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK. Date: September 14th, 11:00-12:00 Abstract: The smart grid paradigm is founded on the integration of existing power grids with advanced sensing and communication infrastructure. While the benefits provided by this setting are crucial for the future development of power grids, it also increases the dependency on system monitoring procedures and opens the door to security threats. In this talk, we first address the privacy problem posed by the installation of smart meters at the consumer level. Information theoretic tools provide quantifiable privacy guarantees for power consumption profiles modelled as memoryless random processes but have not yet been successfully used in realistic settings with complex consumption profiles. We propose privacy guarantees for a wide range of random processes based on non-probabilistic permuting channel models for the system. In the second part of the talk we shift our attention to the state estimation problem at the transmission level. One of the main contingencies faced by state estimation procedures is intentionally corrupted data by a malicious attacker. We review recent results and introduce new information-theoretic attacks that simultaneously minimize the amount of information obtained by the operator from the grid and the probability of attack detection. |
Bio: Iñaki Esnaola is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Visiting Research Collaborator in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, NJ. He received an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2006 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, in 2011. In 2010-2011 he was a Research Intern at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, NJ, and in 2011-2013 he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His research interests include information theory and communication theory with an emphasis on the application to complex systems.
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Plenary Talk #3: Caching Networks: Low-Subpacketization Schemes and Improved Delivery Methods. [Talk #3 Slides] Speaker: Michèle A. Wigger, Department of Communications and Electronics, Telecom ParisTech, LTCI, France. Date: September 14th, 12:15-13:15 Abstract: Caching is a promising technique to decrease load and latency in future cellular systems. Popular contents are prefetched in cache memories close to the end users during periods of low network congestion, with the goal to reduce network load at periods of peak traffic. The main challenge is that in the prefetching phase, the server doesn’t know which users will request which files. Maddah-Ali and Niesen proposed to split the various files into small sub packets and prefetch each sub packet at a subset of users in a way to create multi-cast opportunities for the peak-traffic delivery phase. The Maddah-Ali and Niesen work relies on a set of idealised assumptions. In this talk, we relax some of these assumptions and show how to code in the new, more realistic, setup. Specifically, we start by discussing placement delivery arrays, introduced by Yan et al., as a method to obtain new prefetching and delivery schemes with a significantly reduced number of sub packets. We further relax the assumption that delivery communication takes place over a noise and error-free link, and show new coding opportunities for communication over noisy broadcast channels. Finally, we discuss new coding schemes with only a small numbers of sub packets for a class of relay networks, the so called combination networks. |
Bio: Michèle Wigger received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering, with distinction, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering both from ETH Zurich in 2003 and 2008, respectively. She was awarded two ETH Medals, one for her Master Thesis and one for her PhD Thesis. Dr. Wigger received a Swiss National Science Foundation Scholarship for Prospective Researchers, and in 2009 was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, USA. She has held visiting professor appointments at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich. She joined Telecom Paris Tech, Paris France in 2009 where she is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Wigger is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Communications Letters. She has served as a TPC member for numerous conferences in information theory and communications (e.g., ISIT 2012-2017; ITW 2015 and 2017; PIMRC 2013-2015). She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and also of its outreach subcommittee. Funding accomplishments include an Emergences Grant from the city of Paris, a Discruptive-ICT grant from Huawei, and an ERC Starting Grant.