Speaker: Marco Lops

Affiliation: Università di Napoli “Federico II” 

Report Title: Ambient Backscatter Communications exploiting Radar Clutter

Abstract: 

The ISAC paradigm has been inspired by the need for efficiently exploiting the physical resources, thus accommodating a plurality of services which would have otherwise required dedicated infrastructure. Ambient Backscatter Communications (ABC), on the other hand, are inspired by a similar philosophy: they in fact establish communication links by exploiting ambient signals, which would be otherwise wasted, through very simple zero-consumption devices, the so-called “tags”, which scatter towards a receiver, the “reader”, phase-shifted versions of the impinging radiation. In this talk the speaker will present some recent material wherein ABC exploit the reverberation generated by a radar system, the so-called clutter, as an ambient signal, presenting some simple and convenient modulation techniques and exploring the merits and the limitations of such an architecture.

Biography: 

Marco Lops is a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Information Technology (DIETI) at the University "Federico II" of Naples. He obtained his ``Laurea'' and his Ph.D. degrees from "Federico II'' University (Naples), where he was first assistant and then associate Professor. In March 2000 he moved to University of Cassino and Southern Latium as a full professor, and he returned to "Federico II" in 2018. Meanwhile, in 2009-2012, he was also with ENSEEIHT (Toulouse), first as full professor (on leave of absence from Italy) and then as visiting professor. In fall 2008 he was a visiting professor at University of Minnesota and in spring 2009 at Columbia University. Previously, he had also held visiting positions at University of Connecticut, at Rice University and at Princeton University. In 2009-2015 he served two terms in the Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee (SAM). He has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Communications and Networks, for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (Area: Detection and Estimation, two terms), for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (two terms). He served two terms as Senior Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He was co-recipient (with Ezio Biglieri) of the 2014 best paper award from the Journal of Communications and Networks.  He was selected to serve as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society during 2018-2020. His research interests are in detection and estimation, with emphasis on communications and radar signal processing and he has authored or co-authored over 90 scientific papers published on refereed journals and is a Fellow of the IEEE.