Keynote 3

Learning from the sky: Flying access networks for beyond 5G David Gesbert Professor, IEEE Fellow EURECOM, France Abstract The use of flying robots (drones) carrying radio transceiver equipment is the new promising frontier in our quest towards ever more flexible, adaptable and spectrally efficient wireless networks. Beyond obvious challenges within regulatory, control, navigation, and operational domains, the deployment of autonomous flying radio access network (Fly-RANs) also come with a number of exciting new research problems such as the issue of optimal automatic placement of the drones in non-trivial propagation scenarios (i.e. scenarios where the optimal placement is not just dictated by a trivial geometry argument due to shadowing effects, e.g. in cities).  We present several different approaches, lying at the cross-roads between machine learning, signal processing and optimization. One approach involves the reconstruction of a city map from sampled radio measurements which can have application beyond the realm of communications. Biography David Gesbert (IEEE Fellow) is Professor and Head of the Communication Systems Department, EURECOM. He obtained the Ph.D degree from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, France, in 1997. From 1997 to 1999 he has been with the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University. He was then a founding engineer of Iospan Wireless Inc, a Stanford spin off pioneering MIMO-OFDM (now Intel). D. Gesbert has published about 270 papers and 25 patents, some winning the 20015 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2012 SPS Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, 2004 IEEE Best Tutorial Paper Award (Communications Society), 2005 Young Author Best Paper Award for Signal Proc. Society journals, and several conference best paper awards. He was recently a Technical Co-chair for ICC2017 in Paris. He was named in the 2014 Thomson-Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers in Computer Science. Since 2015, he holds the ERC Advanced grant "PERFUME" on the topic of smart device Communications in future wireless networks. He held visiting professor positions in KTH (2014) and TU Munich (2016).  Since 2017 he is also a visiting Academic Master within the Program 111 at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He is a  Professor in the Joint BUPT-EURECOM Open5G Lab.