Dr. Rui Zhang
National University of Singapore

Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles: opportunities and challenges

Biography:Dr. Rui Zhang received the B.Eng. (First-Class Hons.) and M.Eng. degrees from the National University of Singapore in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA, in 2007, all in electrical engineering. From 2007 to 2010, he worked at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore, where he now holds a Senior Research Scientist joint appointment. Since 2010, he has joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor. His current research interests include energy-efficient and energy-harvesting-enabled wireless communications, wireless information and power transfer, multiuser MIMO, cognitive radio, smart girds, and optimization methods. He has published over 200 papers, which have been cited more than 9,000 times. He was the recipient of the 6th IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, and the Young Researcher Award of the National University of Singapore in 2015. He was the co-recipient of the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2015. He has served for over 30 international conferences as TPC members and Organizing Committee members, and as the guest editor for several special issues in international journals. He is an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM and SAM Technical Committees, and the Vice Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Board Technical Affairs Committee. He is the primary voting representative of IEEE Signal Processing Society at the IEEE Technical Committee on RFID (CRFID).He is an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications(Green Communications and Networking Series). He was listed as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher 2015.
Abstract:Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this talk, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic network architecture, channel models and key design considerations, as well as highlighting the new opportunities for research.