IEEE.orgIEEE Xplore Digital Library IEEE Standards IEEE SpectrumMore Sites
Tutorial #9 - Optical Wireless Communication: Fundamental Limits, New Advances and Future Perspectives - VTC2020-Fall Victoria

Tutorial #9 – Optical Wireless Communication: Fundamental Limits, New Advances and Future Perspectives

Instructor: Anas Chaaban, University of British Columbia, Canada
Instructor: Zouheir Rezki, University of Idaho, USA
Instructor: Mohamed-Slim Alouini, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Driven by the crowded RF spectrum, Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) recently gained increasing industrial and academic interest. OWC can be used for various applications including but not limited to vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. However, OWC has fundamental differences compared with radio-frequency communications, which must be considered with designing an OWC communication system. Consequently, it is important to understand the fundamentals of, and extract design guidelines for OWC systems. This tutorial covers these aspects for Intensity-Modulation OWC for practical outdoor, indoor, and vehicular communications applications.

Bio: Anas Chaaban received his Maitrise-es-Sciences degree in Electronics from the Lebanese University, Lebanon, in 2006. He received his M.Sc. degree in Communications Technology and his Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the University of Ulm and the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany, in 2009 and 2013, respectively. From 2008 to 2009, he was with the Daimler AG research group on machine vision (machine learning), Ulm, Germany. He was a Research Assistant with the Emmy-Noether Research Group on Wireless Networks at the University of Ulm from 2009 to 2011, which relocated to the Ruhr-University of Bochum in 2011. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-University of Bochum from 2013 to 2014, and at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi-Arabia, from 2015 to 2017. He joined the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, as an Assistant Professor in 2018. His research interests are in the areas of information theory, coding, and their application in wireless communications.

Dr. Chaaban received the Canadian Society of Information Theory paper award in 2019, the best paper award at ICCSPA in 2015, and the best poster award at the IEEE Comm. Theory Workshop in 2011. He is a member of the IEEE since 2009, a Senior Member since 2017, and a member of the Canadian Society of Information Theory. He served as an editor of the IEEE Access Special Section on Optical Wireless Technologies for 5G Communications and Beyond (2017), the Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies (Wiley) (2017-2018), and the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communication Networks (Springer) (2017-2018). He currently serves as an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications (2018-to date), a financial chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Workshop (CTW) 2020, and a technical program committee member of multiple conferences.

Bio: Zouheir Rezki is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Idaho. He is a 2019 (2020 – 2025) NSF CAREER Awardee. He received his Ph.D. from University of Montreal, Polytechnique Engineering School in 2008 and his thesis was nominated for “Best Thesis of the Year”. Before joining the University of Idaho in August 2016, he was a Senior Research Scientist in the Computer Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Before joining KAUST in 2009, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. During this time, he received the prestigious Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant: CA 30 K from “The Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies”, for research on Cognitive Radio Networks. In 2013, he has been elevated to the rank of Senior Member of IEEE. In 2014, he has been appointed Editor of IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. His current research covers a wide range of topics in wireless communications and networking including security and privacy of data networks, applying machine-learning techniques to design and optimize modern communication systems, information theory, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication, optical communication and application of communication as an enabling technology for smart grids.

Bio: Mohamed-Slim Alouini is an IEEE Fellow since 2009. He was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a Faculty Member in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then in the Texas A&M University at Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar, before joining the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, as a Professor of electrical engineering in 2009. His current research interests include the modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless communication systems.