W1: 1st Workshop on Real-Time Communications toward 6G (WRTC)

Co-chair: Federico Chiariotti, University of Padova, Italy
Co-chair: Jie Cao, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
Co-chair: Zhongxiang Wei, Tongji University, China
Co-chair: Nikolaos Pappas, Linköping University, Sweden

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) and pervasive fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communications, linked with significant computational capabilities, are posed to revolutionize almost every aspect of our daily life, including products such as smartphones and intelligent vehicles and crucial tasks such as precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. Real-time communication has been envisioned to support time-critical applications with low latency and high-reliability requirements. Enhanced support for real-time IoT has been introduced in the R17 of 3GPP. In this context, the Age of Information (AoI) is now present in several 3GPP standardization proposals as a KPI for sixth-generation (6G) systems, and the focus on machine-to-machine communications will only increase its relevance. However, most of the research on AoI and its variants has been purely theoretical: For the concept to be fully integrated into the emerging IoT, research needs to consider practical aspects tied to energy consumption, short packet decoding, and protocol design.

The research community has shown interest in these challenges. However, they have lacked a venue, as more theoretical papers have often been preferred: our workshop aims at bridging the gap between the more theoretical research of the past few years and actual implementation by fostering discussion and welcoming case studies and practical measurements as well as analytical work, attracting the AoI, real-time communication and IoT communities and, hopefully, a large number of attendees from both academia and the industry.

Co-chair Bios:

Federico Chiariotti

Bio: Federico Chiariotti (Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. degree in information engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2019. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy. Between 2020 and 2022, he worked on semantic communications and AoI at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed papers on wireless networks, latency and AoI in wireless IoT scenarios, and the use of artificial intelligence techniques to improve network performance. His current research interests include semantic communications, protocol design, Age and Value of Information, and bike sharing system optimization. He received of the Best Paper Award at several conferences, including the IEEE INFOCOM 2020 WCNEE Workshop.

Jie Cao

Bio: Jie Cao (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in electronic and information engineering, from the Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China in 2022. From Aug 2021 to Aug 2022, he was with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, as a Research Assistant. He is currently a research scientist in I2R since Oct 2022. His current research interests include ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), short packet communication, and Age of Information (AoI). He has authored over 20 peer-reviewed papers on wireless communications, URLLC and AoI on top-tier journals and international conferences.

Zhongxiang Wei

Bio: Zhongxiang Wei (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K., in 2017. From March 2016 to March 2017, he was with the Institution for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, as a Research Assistant. From March 2018 to March 2021, he was with the Department of Electrical and electronics Engineering, University College London, as a research associate. He is currently an associate professor at Tongji University, China. He has authored and co-authored more than 50 papers published on top-tier journals and international conferences. His research interests include anonymous communications, constructive interference design, and millimeter-wave communications. He has acted as a TPC member or the Session Chair of various international conferences. He was a recipient of an Exemplary Reviewer of the IEEE TWC in 2016, the Outstanding Self- Financed Students Abroad in 2018, and the A*STAR Research Attachment Programme (ARAP) in 2016.

Nikolaos Pappas

Bio: Nikolaos Pappas (Senior Member, IEEE) is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Crete, Greece, in 2012. He was a Visiting Scholar with the Institute of Systems Research, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD, USA. His main research interests include the field of wireless communication networks with emphasis on the semanticsaware communications, energy harvesting networks, network-level cooperation, age of information, and stochastic geometry. From 2013 to 2018, he was an Editor of the IEEE Communications Letters. He was a guest editor for the IEEE Internet of Things Journal on ‘‘Age of Information and Data Semantics for Sensing, Communication and Control Co-Design in IoT”. He is currently an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks, the IEEE Open Journal of Communications Society, and Expert editor for invited papers of the IEEE Communications Letters. He has served as the Symposium Co-Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) and the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) in 2022.

To submit a paper, please visit: https://events.vtsociety.org/vtc2024-spring/conference-sessions/call-for-workshops/