Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Terahertz Communications for Wireless Extended Reality

December 2023 – December 2025

Objective
This research aims to design a new frontier for wireless extended reality (XR), achieved by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided terahertz (THz) communications, for providing reliable, low-latency and energy-efficient wireless XR services. Advanced machine learning algorithms will be exploited to develop intelligent, green, wireless XR solutions. The results are expected to apply to the wireless XR research and provide good insights for other fundamental wireless communication research areas.

Background
Extended reality (XR) is changing people’s lifestyles through the interaction of physical and virtual spaces. Wireless XR enables users to move freely and have a better quality of experience. However, wireless XR faces critical challenges such as high data rates, low interaction latency and limited power budget. Terahertz (THz) communications have emerged as a promising solution towards wireless XR due to its abundant spectrum. Meanwhile, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can be deployed to compensate for the severe signal attenuation at THz frequencies. Although THz communications and IRS have been widely exploited for wireless communications, how to employ them in wireless XR is still an open question.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Chen Chen is a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He received the B.E. degree from the East China University of Science and Technology, China, in 2018 and the PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2022. He was a Marie Curie PhD Fellow. From 2022 to 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research interests include massive MIMO, wireless intelligence, wireless security, mmWave/THz networks, signal processing, and machine learning.

Main supervisor
Carlo Fischione, Professor, Division of Network and Systems Engineering, KTH

Co-supervisor
Emil Björnson, Professor, Division of Communication Systems, KTH