Keynote | Communications and Power: Two Sides of One Tapestry | Bruno Clerckx
Radio waves carry both energy and information simultaneously. Nevertheless, radio-frequency (RF) transmissions of these quantities have traditionally been treated separately. Future wireless networks will experience a paradigm shift, namely, unifying wireless transmission of information and power to make the best use of the RF spectrum and radiation as well as the network infrastructure for the dual purpose of communicating and energizing. Such networks will enable trillions of future low-power devices to sense, compute, connect, and energize anywhere, anytime, and on the move. The design of such future networks brings new challenges and opportunities for RF, communications, signal processing, machine learning, sensing, and computing. In this talk, I give an overview progress in laying the foundations of the envisioned dual-purpose networks by establishing a signal theory and design for wireless information and power transmission (WIPT) and identifying the fundamental tradeoff between conveying information and power wirelessly.Bruno Clerckx is a (Full) Professor, the Head of the Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Lab, and the Deputy Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group, within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, London, U.K. He is also the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Silicon Austria Labs (SAL) where he is responsible for all research areas of Austria's top research center for electronic based systems. He received the MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Imperial College London, U.K. Prior to joining Imperial College in 2011, he was with Samsung Electronics, Suwon, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m). He has authored two books on “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “MIMO Wireless Networks”, 250 peer-reviewed international research papers, and 150 standards contributions, and is the inventor of 80 issued or pending patents among which 15 have been adopted in the specifications of 4G standards and are used by billions of devices worldwide. His research spans the general area of wireless communications and signal processing for wireless networks. He received the prestigious Blondel Medal 2021 from France for exceptional work contributing to the progress of Science and Electrical and Electronic Industries, the 2021 Adolphe Wetrems Prize in mathematical and physical sciences from Royal Academy of Belgium, multiple awards from Samsung, IEEE best student paper award, and the EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) best paper award 2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IET, and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer.