Integrated Sensing and Communications for Perceptive Smart Cities

Research topics Networking | Knowledge Transfer | Collaboration | UCL Cities partnership agenda 

Description

The theme for the call is “Climate Change and Health in the City”, and we aim to focus on addressing the underpinning telecommunications and monitoring aspects of the topic through a large scale integration of sensing and communication functionalities of a network. 

We focus into two sub-themes: traffic and environment. Both sub-themes comprise a path towards a Healthy and Smart Society that depends on large infrastructures like urban transportation systems or water distribution networks. These systems must operate efficiently, with predictable performance and meet stringent safety, security, and communication requirements. In addition, the dense deployment of communication access points with the fifth generation (5G) communication networks, together with our proposed research on enabling sensing through communication devices, has the potential to enable pervasive sensing and monitoring capabilities in the communication infrastructure. This has potential for immense impact in traffic monitoring and control, security and event detection in urban areas, environmental monitoring with RF sensors among many others. This dual communications and sensing functionality is currently absent in the communication network, and requires a large scale cooperation involving signal design, network optimization, device and hardware design in complex environments with multiple access points, users, and traffic patterns.

Towards addressing these requirements, it is necessary to have an interdisciplinary team in the related disciplines of wireless communications, optimization, and machine learning. Using the UCL expertise on signal processing and wireless communications, specifically on radar and communication transmissions, with the expertise of Prof. Carlo Fischione and Dr. Mairton Barros on optimization, distributed machine learning, and full-duplex communications, we intend to cover important aspects on transportation and environmental systems that contribute to the theme of this application.