Holographic radio architectures and signal processing for future high-throughput near-field communications

A completely different approach, yet largely unexplored, is to resort to MIMO near-field communications, dubbed as holographic radio. The near-field propagation can hold up to a significant range especially in high-frequency bands. Because transmission in the near field implies spherical waves instead of plane waves, the channel matrix can have a high rank even for point-to-point links. Hence, high throughput can be achieved with moderate bandwidth even in a point-to-point link because multiple independent streams can be sent in parallel.

Your mission for this PhD will be to define a performant - yet realistic - system concept and architecture of MIMO near-field communications and to develop the associated physical layer algorithms, leveraging the specific structure of the channel. You will have to deal with multi-dimensional trade-offs encompassing large antenna count, complexity, theoretical bounds, hardware impairments, to name a few. To support this research, you will develop a detailed simulation environment in Matlab and/or Python. It will be used to evaluate the system performance and optimize the different building blocks of the system. Importantly, it will need a specific channel model for the near-field propagation. The way the near-field channel compares to other MIMO schemes (traditional MIMO exploiting channel diversity, LOS-MIMO, ...) will strengthen the theoretical foundations of this communication scheme. This research may also include experimentation and measurements on a communication testbed.

As a PhD student, you will be part of a large IMEC team working on the research, implementation and prototyping of future communications systems composed of experts in digital, analog and mm-wave design, wireless communication systems, signal processing and machine learning, channel measurements and modelling. This is a unique opportunity to develop innovative, multi-disciplinary technology and shape future wireless networks. You will publish your research in top-level journals and conferences.