Erik G. Larsson

Title: Emerging enabling technologies for mobile communications

Abstract:  I will start with a retrospect of modern mobile communications, and especially massive MIMO in 5G, came about. While this technology is already very good, several challenges remain: especially, coverage holes, and difficulties to send multiple streams to multiple-antenna users because of insufficient channel rank. Perhaps the ultimate solution is distributed MIMO (also known as cell-free massive MIMO). But while this is at heart a powerful technology, unless the phase oscillators between different access points are mutually locked, achieving accurate phase-alignment for coherent multiuser beamforming on downlink is difficult. Another emerging technology is to deploy swarms of network-controlled repeaters, which could be built and installed cheaply, but require new types of coordination and give rise to new signal processing problems.  I will illuminate the fundamental limits of these emerging technologies, and the tools needed to understand and optimize them.

Bio: Erik G. Larsson is Professor at Linköping University, Sweden, and a Fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP. He co-authored Fundamentals of Massive MIMO(Cambridge, 2016) and Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications (Cambridge, 2003). Recent service includes membership of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Awards Board (2017–2019), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine editorial board (2018–2021), and the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications steering committee (2019–2022). He received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award twice, in 2012 and 2014, the IEEE ComSoc Stephen O. Rice Prize in Communications Theory 2015, the IEEE ComSoc Leonard G. Abraham Prize 2017, the IEEE ComSocBest Tutorial Paper Award 2018, the IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize in 2019, and the IEEE SPS Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award in 2023.