Talk of Prof. Emil Björnson



Emil Björnson



Physically Large Antenna Arrays: When the Near-Field Becomes Far-Reaching

Abstract

The early 5G deployments are almost exclusively based on “Massive MIMO” technology, where each base station has an array with many antenna-integrated radios. This is a great achievement for a technology concept that, ten years ago‚ was generally believed to be too bulky, overly power hungry, and only useful for niche applications. Despite the word “massive”, 5G base stations are physically small from the user’s viewpoint. What if we would build truly physically large antenna arrays in the future? In this keynote, we look at the benefits that such arrays can potentially provide for future wireless communications. In particular, we will discover how the radiative near field can reach several kilometers from the transmitter array and how this changes the physical shape of the radiated signals and the ability to serve many users simultaneously. Maybe the use of physical large arrays can be a viable alternative to using more bandwidth?




Biography

Emil Björnson is an Associate Professor at Linköping University and Visiting Full Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He performs research on MIMO communications, radio resource allocation, machine learning for communications, and energy efficiency. He has authored the three textbooks and has made a large amount of simulation code publicly available. He has received the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, the 2019 EURASIP Early Career Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award, the 2020 Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, the 2020 CTTC Early Achievement Award, and the 2021 IEEE ComSoc RCC Early Achievement Award. He also received six Best Paper Awards at the conferences.