From Antenna Abundance to Antenna Intelligence: Enabling Scalable 6G MIMO
Next: "From ISAC to DISAC - Concepts, Trade-offs, and Opportunities" by Henk Wymeersch, Chalmers University, Sweden
Join us for the second session of the exciting webinar series on "New Frontiers in Signal Processing in 6G Wireless Networks", a collaboration between IEEE Signal Processing, IEEE Communications Society chapters in Ottawa, and IEEE ComSoC Young Professionals.
Register now and stay tuned for updates on upcoming speakers and topics!
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- Starts 28 September 2025 06:00 PM UTC
- Ends 07 October 2025 04:00 PM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Prof. Emil Bjornson
Biography:
Emil Björnson is a Professor of Wireless Communication at the KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He is an IEEE Fellow, Digital Futures Fellow, Wallenberg Academy Fellow, and Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. He has a podcast and YouTube channel called Wireless Future. His research focuses on multi-antenna communications and radio resource management, using methods from communication theory, signal processing, and machine learning. He has authored four textbooks and published much simulation code. He has received the 2018 and 2022 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Awards 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, the 2021 IEEE ComSoc RCC Early Achievement Award, the 2023 IEEE ComSoc Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2024 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize.
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Address:KTH, , Sweden
Agenda
Massive MIMO is a cornerstone of 5G cellular networks, unlocking unprecedented capacity through spatial multiplexing. Unfortunately, this performance enhancement comes at the cost of using many hardware components. The Massive MIMO philosophy is the abundance of service antennas, e.g., 64 base station antennas to send 8 data layers, when 8 antennas would theoretically suffice. This overprovisioning isn’t accidental; it ensures favorable propagation conditions so that most user channels are compatible for multiplexing, regardless of the channel environment. But as we move toward 6G, this approach becomes unsustainable since the number of antennas must grow much quicker than the network capacity.
In this seminar, we’ll explore a bold shift in multi-user MIMO design: achieving high capacity with fewer antennas per data layer. The key lies in smarter, site-specific antenna architectures. By moving beyond conventional half-wavelength-spaced uniform arrays, we can unlock the potential gains of sparse arrays, non-uniform geometries, transmissive intelligent metasurfaces, and even physically movable elements. These techniques promise a new era of scalable MIMO technology—tailored for real-world deployments and intelligently optimized for 6G spatial multiplexing without requiring an abundance of antennas.
As part of webinar series on "New Frontiers in Signal Processing for 6G Wireless Systems"