Abstract: A rapid increase in the use of wireless services over the last few decades has led to the problem of radio-frequency (RF) spectrum exhaustion. More specifically, due to this RF spectrum scarcity, additional RF bandwidth allocation, as utilized in the recent past over “traditional bands”, is not anymore enough to fulfill the demand for more wireless applications and higher data rates. The talk goes first over the potential offered by extreme band communication (XB-Com) systems to relieve spectrum scarcity.  Indeed, mm-wave, THz, and free space optics broadband wireless systems recently attracted several research interests worldwide due to the progress in electronics and photonics technologies. By utilizing these extreme frequency bands and employing extreme large bandwidths, the 6G target data rates over 100 Gbps could be achieved. The talk then summarizes some of the challenges that need to be surpassed before such kinds of systems can be deployed.  For instance, it explains how the THz transmission band has immunity against the fog compared with the optical one, while being affected by the rain as it is the case for the mm-wave band. In addition, the role of ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in overcoming the distance problem at very high frequencies will be discussed. Finally, the talk offers an overview of some recent studies illustrating how these different XB-Com technologies can collaborate to increase emerging and future networks’ reliability and coverage while maintaining their high capacity.

 Bio:

Mohamed-Slim Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical  Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1998. He served
as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota then in the Texas A&M University at Qatar before joining in 2009 the  King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) where he is now a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prof. Alouini is a Fellow of the IEEE and OPTICA (Formerly the Optical Society of America (OSA)). He is currently particularly interested in addressing the technical challenges associated with the uneven distribution, access to, and use of information and communication technologies in rural, low-income, disaster, and/or hard-to-reach areas.