Fernando J. Velez of Instituto de Telecomunicações and Universidade da Beira Interior

Efficient and intelligent future usage of frequency spectrum will need to be addressed far beyond 5G. In addition to the precursors in the USA with 1G, then in Europe (2 to 4G), and now in China (with 5G), the mobile communication sectors are requesting more and more spectrum meaning more and more complex radio spectrum management. The emergence of smarter spectrum usage calls for advanced research to satisfy users’ needs for more data bandwidth but not more “wasted” EM radiations.

To the best of our knowledge, AI based spectrum management solutions remains to be fully exploited since, up to now more data bandwidth or throughput was mainly obtained by increasing the available spectrum bandwidth and power to keep an acceptable signal to noise ratio.

The talk comprises research in resource management techniques and related topics for Advanced New Radio Small Cell Networks: 5G and beyond. Research will include mainly centralized solutions, where Centralized-Radio Access Network or Cloud-RAN are considered to enhance mobile broadband, massive machine type of communications and ultra-reliable low-latency communications for a broad range of usage including enterprises and future mission critical applications.

The research efforts aim to put together a sketch of the deployment, proof-of-concept and demonstration targets of the intelligence-enabling radio resource management and the underlying spectrum issues, including not only aspects of spectrum sharing/aggregation, cognitive radio and introduction of intelligence, as aspects of energy efficiency in both mobile terrestrial networks and multi-hop systems with flying communication nodes or device-to-device wireless networks. Licensed, unlicensed and different types of licensed assisted access or licensed shared access will be considered.

Future mobile and wireless networks will comprise heterogeneous networks, with very small cells overlaid with macro and micro cells, where single-hop topologies will be complemented with multi-hop networks with relays, and where security aspects are of particular importance. Flying UAV acting as relays are also of great interest in these beyond 5G ecosystems, as well as the studies on the cost/revenue trade-off and business plans, arising from the innovative aspects in this type of scenarios.

Different solutions are based on intelligent interference management (or avoidance), evolved multi-band scheduling (on top of packet scheduling to manage radio resources), big data and machine learning strategies. Not only sub-6GHz bands but also future millimeter wavebands are considered.

Biography:

Fernando J. Velez (M93SM05) received the Licenciado, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon in 1993, 1996 and 2001, respectively. Since 1995 he has been with the Department of Electromechanical Engineering of Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, where he is Associate Professor. He is also a senior researcher of Instituto de Telecomunicações. Fernando was an IEF Marie Curie Research Fellow in King’s College London (KCL) in 2008/09 (OPTIMOBILE IEF) and a Marie Curie ERG fellow at Universidade da Beira Interior from 2010 until March 2013 (PLANOPTI ERG). Fernando was the coordinator of the Instituto de Telecomunicações team in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN Action (TeamUp5G) that started in 2019. He made or makes part of the teams of several European and Portuguese research projects on mobile communications, and he was the coordinator of six Portuguese projects. In 2018/19 was the coordinator of CONQUEST (CMU/ECE/0030/2017), an exploratory project from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Portugal, a collaboration with the Department of Engineering and Public Policy from CMU. Fernando was also co-chairing the Vertical Team 4 (Smart Buildings and Cities) within COST Action CA20120 INTERACT until 2024. Currently, he is coordinating the TALENT starting grant within the UNITA Alliance. Since 2026, Fernando became the elected IEEE ComSoc Portugal Chapter co-chair. From 2014 until 2020, Fernando Velez was proud of coordinating the Covilhã branch of the Instituto de Telecomunicações, a site of his research unit with around 25 Ph.D. researchers, more than 20 Ph.D. students and tens of M.Sc. students. From 2019 until now he has been one of the scientific coordinators of the prestigious Carnegie Melon University - Portugal research program. He has authored four books, 25 book chapters, 190 papers and communications in international journals and conferences, plus 49 in national conferences. His main research areas are cellular planning tools, traffic from mobility, wireless body sensor networks and wearable technologies, ML applied to radio resource management, spectrum management, and cost/revenue performance of advanced mobile communication systems.

Email:

Address:Faculdade de Engenharia - DEM, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, 6201-001