PhD Studentship - Waveform Design for Integrated Sensing, Localization, and Communications (ISLAC) in 6G

Closing date: 23:59 on 31st May 2024 (for October 2024 Starters).

Supervisory team

Dr Zilong Liu, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, University of Essex.

Scientific background

In recent years, integrated sensing, localization, and communication (ISLAC) systems, widely regarded as an important building component of 6G, have attracted increasing research attention from both academia and industry. Capable of simultaneously performing sensing, localization, and communication tasks whilst sharing a majority of the hardware components and signal processing tasks, a typical application scenario of ISLAC is for connected autonomous vehicles where multiple sensors and communication devices are jointly deployed to measure/track/exchange certain key system information such as speeds, vibrations, approaching target distances, vehicle locations.

This project aims for a systematic investigation on analysis, design, and evaluation of enhanced ISLAC waveforms. Specifically, you will exploit a number of multicarrier waveforms (e.g., OTFS, OCDM, OFDM, DFT-spread-OFDM) to design novel ISLAC systems. Starting from the 5G New Radio framework, you will further optimize the multicarrier waveforms to improve the sensing and localization performances. You will develop nove signal processing algorithms to 1) faciliate low-complexity and low-latency sensing and localization; 2) enhance the receiver robustness against various hardware impairments as well as the complex vehicular wireless channels. You will leverage the recent advances in machine learning science to address certain challenging sensing and localization problems (e.g., under NLOS transmission) that cannot be modelled/tackled in a traditional way.  

You will be a key researcher for the two EPSRC projects: DRIVE and SORT. Besides working with many excellent researchers at Essex, you will collaborate with a number of world-leading universities (e.g., Nanyang Technological Unviersity Singapore) associated to these two projects as well as our prestigious industrial partners, i.e., CONIGITAL, VIAVI Solutions, AccelerComm, Samsung Cambridge. Potentially, you may be secondmented to these universities/companies in order to deepen the exisiting research collaborations.

Person specification

This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated student with a solid background in wireless communications and signal processing, who is keen to learn new skills to design the upcoming 6G mobile systems. The candidate is also expected to have a strong mathematical foundation and excellent programming skills (e.g., C, Python, MATLAB).

Email a cover letter, research proposal (capped to 4000 words), CV, academic transcripts to zilong.liu@essex.ac.uk via the ‘Apply’ button above

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