Petar Popovski

Title: Towards Real Time in Wireless 6G Communications: How Latency Gets Complicated

Abstract: With the advent of 5G technology, the notion of latency got a prominent role in wireless connectivity, serving as a proxy term for addressing the requirements for real-time communication. As wireless systems evolve toward 6G, the ambition to immerse the digital into physical reality will increase. This talk will present the general concept of timing in wireless communication systems and its relation to effective information generation, processing, transmission, and reconstruction at the senders and receivers.  It starts by discussing latency and its components in systems that involve wireless communication and computing. The notion of one-way latency will be generalized to closed-loop latency, which is particularly relevant for goal-oriented communications. Next, it will present other timing measures beyond latency, such as Age of Information (AoI) and its derivatives. Inspired by multisensory perception in humans, the talk will introduce Temporal Windows of Integration (TWI) for wireless systems that combine sensing and communication and show their role in determining causality and simultaneity in perceptive wireless networks. One of the takeaways is that the future Base Stations and Access Points will have a timestamping functionality that determines the chronology of the events, simultaneity, and causality and in that way ensure trustworthiness in the physical-world events that are mapped to the digital infrastructure.

Bio: Petar Popovski is a Professor at Aalborg University, where he heads the section on Connectivity and a Visiting Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen. He received his Dipl.-Ing (1997) and M. Sc. (2000) degrees in communication engineering from the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje and the Ph.D. degree (2005) from Aalborg University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015), the Danish Elite Researcher award (2016), IEEE Fred W. Ellersick prize (2016), IEEE Stephen O. Rice prize (2018), Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Smart Grid Communications (2019), the Danish Telecommunication Prize (2020) and Villum Investigator Grant (2021). He was a Member at Large at the Board of Governors in IEEE Communication Society, Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee, as well as the General Chair for IEEE SmartGridComm 2018 and IEEE Communication Theory Workshop 2019. His research interests are in the area of wireless communication and communication theory. He authored the book “Wireless Connectivity: An Intuitive and Fundamental Guide”, published by Wiley in 2020. He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS.