Anagrafe della ricerca

The project is in two fields: 1 - Smart propagation environment. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) represent the most promising Key Enabling Technology candidate to take the challenges of 6G systems in terms of dramatically reduced latency and ultra-high capacity. In this vision, future wireless systems will be assisted by a network of passive and active smart nodes (smart skins, RISs, smart repeaters, integrated access and backhauling nodes) that can meet the KPIs in terms of capacity, latency, jitter, security, reduced power consumption, etc. and at the same time remain environmentally friendly, easy to deploy, and compatible with existing systems. Smart skins and RISs are characterized by an extremely low power consumption and process electro-magnetic (EM) signals at the speed of light, dramatically reducing latency and complexity with respect to the corresponding fully-digital baseband solutions and maintaining a green environment. The project leverages the expertise of wireless communication and EM groups in Italy to explore this new technology and make it suitable for “restarting” smart radio environments, allowing the Country to play a key role in the communications of the future. 2 – Integrated communication and sensing. The project addresses the integration and coexistence of sensing and communication systems that share the same spatial and spectrum resources. A number of possible architectures will be proposed, ranging from the mere coexistence of nearly independent systems to fully integrated systems, wherein coexistence is purely functional, and energy efficiency is a major constraint. In the latter paradigm, sensing and communication systems are totally integrated and a careful usage of the environmental physical resource will be fostered by means of tools from AI, ML and Federated learning. In detail, the project will focus on statistical/EM environment modeling and validation, optimized resource allocation and sensing/communication waveform design, interference avoidance, learning algorithms integration in the sensing/communication system, energy harvesting, joint optimal distributed sensing task management and communications. The solutions will be tested in two use cases: (i) outdoor, focused on vehicular and drone-based scenarios, (ii) indoor, focused on precise localization and human activity recognition.