T13 Title: Wireless Channel Charting for Massive MIMO

Organizer: Maxime Guillaud
Organizer: Christoph Studer

Abstract: Channel charting is an emerging framework that enables pseudo-positioning of user equipments (UEs) from channel state information (CSI) only. More concretely, channel charting associates CSI to UE spatial location by means of dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, thus enabling the infrastructure base-stations or wireless access points to perform a number of predictive tasks relevant to emerging wireless networks that depend on UE location. Prominent application examples are localization relative to points-of-interest, UE grouping, cell handover, UE path prediction, predictive rate control, assisted beam-finding, etc. The distinctive characteristic of channel charting with respect to classical positioning techniques resides in its self-supervised nature, i.e., the fact that it relies only on measured CSI and no other information (e.g., from global navigation satellite systems or classical localization anchors) is required.

This tutorial will cover the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of channel charting, discuss its implementation in next-generation (beyond 5G) cellular systems, and showcase applications ranging from predictive radio resource management to positioning. The goal of this tutorial is to provide the audience with an exhaustive overview of the nascent research field of channel charting, which is at the intersection of machine learning, numerical optimization, channel modeling, and communication theory. To this end, this tutorial will (i) introduce a wide range of theoretical and algorithm-level concepts, and (ii) demonstrate its efficacy with real-world results from indoor and outdoor channel measurements.

 

Bio: Dr. Maxime Guillaud is a researcher in Huawei Technologies’ Mathematical and Algorithmic Research Lab in Paris, where he heads the signal and information processing group. He has 20 years expertise in the domain of wireless communications, in both academic and industrial research environments. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from EURECOM, France, and previously held positions at Vienna University of Technology, FTW Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, and Bell Labs. He is an expert in the physical layer of modern wireless communications systems, and has made contributions to channel modeling and reciprocity calibration, Massive MIMO, and more. He has published over 50 journal and conference papers, and holds 8 patents. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

Dr. Guillaud has previously presented a tutorial on Full-Duplex Communications in ICC, and has given courses and invited lectures on the 5G Physical Layer in multiple universities.

 

Bio: Prof. Dr. Christoph Studer is an Associate Professor at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2009. In 2005, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Smart Antennas Research Group at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Research Assistant in both the Integrated Systems Laboratory and the Communication Technology Laboratory at ETH Zurich. From 2009 to 2012, Prof. Studer was a Postdoctoral Researcher at CTL, ETH Zurich, and the Digital Signal Processing Group at Rice University. In 2013, he held the position of Research Scientist at Rice University. From 2014 to 2019, Prof. Studer has been an Assistant Professor at Cornell University and an adjunct Assistant Professor at Rice University, TX. Since 2019, Prof. Studer has been an Associate Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and at Cornell Tech in New York, NY. In Summer 2020, Prof. Studer will be an Associate Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

His research interests are in the design and analysis of algorithms and hardware designs for future multi-antenna wireless communication systems.

Prof. Studer received ETH Medals for his M.S. and Ph.D. theses in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He received a two-year Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship for Advanced Researchers in 2011 and a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2017. Prof. Studer won a Michael Tien ’72 Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Engineering, Cornell University, in 2016. He shared the Swisscom/ICTnet Innovations Award in both 2010 and 2013, and he received a number of best paper and best demonstration awards in the areas of communication systems and digital integrated circuit design. In 2019, he was the Technical Area Chair for the 53rd Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, and a Technical Co-Chair for the IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Systems. Since 2019, Prof. Studer is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Open Journal on Circuits and Systems.

Prof. Studer was the lead inventor of Channel Charting in 2018 [1], which was developed together with Prof. Olav Tirkkonen from Aalto University, Finland.