EURASIP Best PhD Thesis Award 2014
Pau Closas, Senior Researcher at CTTC, was awarded with the EURASIP Best PhD Thesis Award 2014 for his contributions to the field of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The distinction is awarded by the prestigious European Signal Processing Association (EURASIP). The Thesis is publicly available:
P. Closas, “Bayesian Signal Processing Techniques for GNSS Receivers: from multipath mitigation to positioning,” PhD Dissertation. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Barcelona, Spain. June 2009. Supervisor: Prof. Juan A. Fernández-Rubio; Co-Advisor: Dr. Carles Fernández-Prades.
The Thesis proposes ground-breaking approximations and analyses to unsolved issues in GNSS receiver design, based on advanced signal processing techniques. GNSS is the general concept used to identify those systems that allow user’s position computation based on a constellation of satellites. Namely, the Thesis explores the following main lines:
– Multipath mitigation: a GNSS receiver computes its position by trilateration from measured distances between the receiver and the set of visible satellites. GNSS receivers are only interested in estimating the delays of signals which are received directly from the satellites. Hence, multipath reflections distort the received signal in a way that may cause a bias, being considered as one of the dominant sources of error in high-precision applications. The multipath mitigation problem is statistically addressed by means of nonlinear filtering techniques, with strong emphasis on Sequential Monte Carlo methods (a.k.a. particle filters) and associated complexity reduction techniques.
– Direct Position Estimation (DPE) is a radically new approach to the positioning problem. Instead on requiring range estimates, DPE focuses on the estimation directly from received and sampled IF signal of position coordinates. Position coordinates are indeed the parameters of interest to the end-user. It is seen that the avoidance of intermediate estimation steps helps to partially overcome some limitations of current approaches, such as the degradation in position accuracy due to multipath and severe channel fading conditions.
– Fundamental Bounds in GNSS Positioning: Derivation of the position estimation bounds for conventional is also addressed in the Thesis, including a theoretical comparison of conventional two-steps and DPE approaches.
The concepts proposed in his PhD Thesis were the core methods analyzed in the European Space Agency (ESA) project ‘ARTEMISA – Advanced Receiver Techniques’, in which the CTTC is involved, and gave place to a number of publications in highly ranked scientific journals.
Researchers from CTTC, UOC, and UPC are awarded at IEEE INFOCOM 2014
The cross-institutional team of researchers formed by Pere Tuset-Peiró, Francisco Vazquez-Gallego, Dr. Jesus Alonso-Zarate, Dr. Luis Alonso and Dr. Xavier Vilajosana, joining efforts from Centre Tecnológic de Telecommunications de Catalunya (CTTC), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) I Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), has been awarded with the Best Demo Runner-Up Award at the prestigious IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM) 2014 with a research demo entitled: “Demonstrating Low-Power Distributed Queuing for Active RFID Communications At 433 MHz”.
The demo consists of a wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) dense network communicating at 433MHz, where a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol has been implemented. This demonstration shows that it is possible to go away from the widely used variations of ALOHA and CSMA protocols (used in WiFi, Zigbee, 3G, LTE technologies), and overcome their well-known congestion problems. With the use of Distributed Queuing (DQ) solutions, it is possible to achieve performance which is independent of the number of devices in a network and is close to the theoretical maximum capacity of a wireless channel. One of the reasons why these solutions are not yet in the market is the number of technological challenges that remain still open to make this technology available. The research group has been working over the last years to solve all these challenges and this demo represents a major breakthrough to show that we are not that far from seeing DQ in the market and changing the way we operate wireless networks as they become denser. This technology is deemed to become a true enabler for the advent of the Internet of Things.
Researcher of the CTTC, is the recipient of the ninth Duran Farell award for Technology Research
Dr. Pau Closas, Senior Researcher of the CTTC, is the recipient of the ninth Duran Farell award for Technology Research. The energy multinational GAS NATURAL FENOSA has been presenting the Durant Farell Award as part of the UPC’s annual recognition to the achievements of the research community in Spain. The award is given biannually to excellent research projects in the field of technology over the previous 3 years.Dr. Pau Closas, together with the Senior Researcher Carles Fernández-Prades, are working on the project ARTEMISA – Advanced Receiver Techniques.
This project, and associated research activities, has been the object of this year’s Award.This project aims to investigate advanced processing techniques for future radio-navigation receivers and to identify possible receiver architectures with the objective of improving final positioning performance in real environments. Tracking/Positioning performance and robustness in channels affected by severe channel conditions (multiple paths, fading channels, blockage, shadowing) are the focus of the activity. The proposals made within the project go well-beyond the state-ofthe-art and are conceptually disruptive, causing a remarkable impact in the GNSS community. The ultimate target of this research is to provide GNSS receivers with enhanced accuracy, integrity, reliability, and robustness with respect to state-of-the-art receiver technology.The members of the jury have valued the trajectory of this research project, which has obtained outstanding scientific and technical results, highly recognized by international organizations and the research community.The awarded research activity constitutes a highly innovative project with many current and future applications, as well as having a great potential for economic and social impact. This research has received the attention of the industry, and among others from the European Space Agency (ESA).The official presentation will take place at the opening ceremony of the academic year 2014-2015 to be held at the UPC on 23th September 2014 at 11:30h at the auditorium (Building Vèrtex, plaça Eusebi Güell, 6, Barcelona).Two CTTC staffers win EADA Best Business Plan Award
Carles Antón-Haro (Director of R&D Programs) and Eva Hernández (Project Management) were honored with the Best Business Plan Award by the Board of Trustees of the EADA Foundation. (The ceremony was held on October 6th at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música.)Their project was chosen from among 10 final projects of the last two Executive MBA classes graduating in spring 2014. Entitled “SSucA: Simple Supercomputing Access”, it featured the business plan for a company that could provide supercomputing services to small and medium enterprises.
Two CTTC members with EADA Best Business Plan Award
Carles Antón-Haro (Director of R&D Programs) and Eva Hernández (Project Management) were honored with the Best Business Plan Award by the Board of Trustees of the EADA Foundation. (The ceremony was held on October 6th at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música.)
Their project was chosen from among 10 final projects of the last two Executive MBA classes graduating in spring 2014. Entitled “SSucA: Simple Supercomputing Access”, it featured the business plan for a company that could provide supercomputing services to small and medium enterprises.
Best Paper Award, Globecom 2014
The research paper “Sharing the Small Cells for Energy Efficient Networking: How much does it cost?” presented in the prestigious IEEE Globecom 2014 conference and authored by the Head of the SMARTECH department Dr. Christos Verikoukis in collaboration with Ms. Alexandra Bousia, Dr. Angelos Antonopoulos, Dr. Elli Kartsakli, and Dr. Luis Alonso has been awarded as the best paper of the Selected Areas in Communications Symposia.The paper considers a potential 5G wireless architecture where the existence of a third party provides a common Small Cells (SC) infrastructure for the operators as an appealing “green” solution, raising though important issues with regard to the cost sharing for the operators. In this paper, the authors effectively address this issue by proposing an accurate cost model for the SCs and employing different state-of-the-art techniques to share this cost. In addition, taking into account the impact of the traffic pattern on this cost, the authors propose a novel hybrid cost sharing policy that provides a fair outcome for the operators. The results highlight the potential energy efficiency gains in the network and offer interesting insights into the discrepancies of the different cost sharing techniques for the deployed SCs.The work has been carried out in the context of the Marie-Curie ITN GREENET project.
A Researcher of CTTC, is awarded with the KTH ISSLS 2000 Foundation Scholarship in Sweden
Charalampos Kalalas, researcher at CTTC with the M2M Department, has been awarded on November 2014 with the Swedish ISSLS 2000 Foundation Scholarship of KTH for the M.Sc. Thesis Project “Enabling LTE for Control System Applications in a Smart Grid Context”.
The purpose of the foundation is to facilitate scientific research and education within the telecommunication area, specifically those areas which are or will be of importance for the development of various types of access networks. Relevant for this grant is also education within adjacent fields that are of importance for the continuing developments of communication based services.
The scholarship is awarded to students that excel in a distinguished way through a degree project at the M.Sc. level which is well executed,
insightful and of high quality. The results from the project should furthermore be expected to make a valuable contribution to the development of various types of access networks or the development of services for communication networks.
Charalampos Kalalas is now a Marie Curie fellow within the research project ADVANTAGE (FP7-607774), hosted by CTTC, and is currently pursuing his PhD in ICT technologies for the Smart Grid at the PhD Program of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).