Jeroen Famaey

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Antwerp

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables radio systems to simultaneously sense and communicate with their environment. This paper, developed within the Hexa-X-II project funded by the European Union, presents a comprehensive cross-layer vision for ISAC in 6G networks, integrating insights from physical-layer design, hardware architecture...

Mars has long captivated the human imagination as a potential destination for settlement and scientific exploration. After deploying individual rovers, the next step in our journey to Mars is the autonomous exploration of the Red Planet using a collaborative swarm of rovers, drones, and satellites. This concept paper envisions a sustainable Mars ex...

Low-cost, resource-constrained, mainte-nance-free, and energy-harvesting (EH) Internet of Things (IoT) devices, referred to as zero-energy devices (ZEDs), are rapidly attracting attention from industry and academia due to their myriad of applications. To date, such devices remain primar-ily unsupported by modern IoT connectivity solutions due to th...

This letter proposes a multi-stream selection framework for \ac{CF-MIMO} networks. Partially coherent transmission has been considered by clustering \acp{AP} into phase-aligned clusters to address the challenges of phase misalignment and inter-cluster interference. A novel stream selection algorithm is developed to dynamically allocate multiple str...

Over the years, advancements such as increased bandwidth, new modulation and coding schemes, frame aggregation, and the use of multiple antennas have been employed to enhance Wi-Fi performance. Nonetheless, as network density and the demand for low-latency applications increases, contention delays and retransmissions have become obstacles to effici...

Achieving extremely high-quality and truly immersive interactive Virtual Reality (VR) is expected to require a wireless link to the cloud, providing multi-gigabit throughput and extremely low latency. A prime candidate for fulfilling these requirements is millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, operating in the 30 to 300 GHz bands, rather than the...

Using Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) wireless communications is often named as the prime enabler for mobile interactive Extended Reality (XR), as it offers multi-gigabit data rates at millisecond-range latency. To achieve this, mmWave nodes must focus their energy towards each other, which is especially challenging in XR scenarios, where the transceiver...

Extended Reality is a revolutionary method of delivering multimedia content to users. A large contributor to its popularity is the sense of immersion and interactivity enabled by having real-world motion reflected in the virtual experience accurately and immediately. This user motion, mainly caused by head rotations, induces several technical chall...

Extended Reality (XR) enables a plethora of novel interactive shared experiences. Ideally, users are allowed to roam around freely, while audiovisual content is delivered wirelessly to their Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). Therefore, truly immersive experiences will require massive amounts of data, in the range of tens of gigabits per second, to be d...

The emergence of optical intelligent reflecting surface (OIRS) technologies marks a milestone in optical wireless communication (OWC) systems, enabling enhanced control over light propagation in indoor environments. This capability allows for the customization of channel conditions to achieve specific performance goals. This paper presents an enhan...

The emergence of optical intelligent reflecting surface (OIRS) technologies marks a milestone in optical wireless communication (OWC) systems, enabling enhanced control over light propagation in indoor environments. This capability allows for the customization of channel conditions to achieve specific performance goals. This paper presents an enhan...

Wi-Fi facilitates the Internet connectivity of billions of devices worldwide, making it an indispensable technology for modern life. Wi-Fi networks are becoming significantly denser, making energy consumption and its effects on operational costs and environmental sustainability crucial considerations. Wi-Fi has already introduced several mechanisms...

This letter proposes a multi-stream selection framework for Cell-Free Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (CF-MIMO) networks. Partially coherent transmission has been considered by clustering Access Points (APs) into phase-aligned clusters to address the challenges of phase misalignment and inter-cluster interference. A novel stream selection algorithm...

This paper focuses on enhancing the energy efficiency (EE) of a cooperative network featuring a `miniature' unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that operates at terahertz (THz) frequencies, utilizing holographic surfaces to improve the network's performance. Unlike traditional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) that are typically used as passive r...

Wi-Fi facilitates the Internet connectivity of billions of devices worldwide, making it an indispensable technology for modern life. Wi-Fi networks are becoming significantly denser, making energy consumption and its effects on operational costs and environmental sustainability crucial considerations. Wi-Fi has already introduced several mechanisms...

In order to achieve truly immersive multimedia experiences, full freedom of movement has to be supported, and high-quality, interactive video delivery to the head-mounted device is vital. In wireless environments, this is very challenging due to the massive bandwidth and ultra-low delay requirements of such applications. Millimeter wave (mmWave) ne...

Extended Reality (XR) enables a plethora of novel interactive shared experiences. Ideally, users are allowed to roam around freely, while audiovisual content is delivered wirelessly to their Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). Therefore, truly immersive experiences will require massive amounts of data, in the range of tens of gigabits per second, to be d...

In recent years, Joint Communication and Sensing (JC&S), has demonstrated significant success, particularly in utilizing sub-6 GHz frequencies with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices for applications such as localization, gesture recognition, and pose classification. Deep learning and the existence of large public datasets has been pivot...

Achieving high-quality wireless interactive Extended Reality (XR) will require multi-gigabit throughput at extremely low latency. The Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) frequency bands, between 24 and 300GHz, can achieve such extreme performance. However, maintaining a consistently high Quality of Experience with highly mobile users is challenging, as mmWave...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received great interest due to their scalability, energy efficiency, and low-cost deployment. By utilizing multi-hop communication, WSNs can cover a wide area using low transmission power without the need for any communication infrastructure. Traditionally, WSNs rely on store-and-forward routing protocols and Ti...

This paper focuses on maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) of a cooperative network involving miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) operating at terahertz (THz) frequencies, leveraging simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). In this context, the considered system encompasses a source node that adopts SWIPT, thereby allowin...

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) using the 6TiSCH standard offer a scalable, cost-effective alternative to wired solutions in industrial environments, especially in hard-to-reach areas. Mains-powered devices face high installation costs and cable vulnerabilities, while battery-powered devices are limited by lifespan and maintenance chall...

Nanoscale devices with THz communication capabilities are envisioned to be deployed within human bloodstreams. Such devices will enable fine-grained sensing-based applications for detecting early indications (i.e., biomarkers) of various health conditions, as well as actuation-based ones such as targeted drug delivery. Associating the locations of...

This paper proposes an energy efficient resource allocation design algorithm for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted downlink ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) network. This setup features a multi-antenna base station (BS) transmitting data traffic to a group of URLLC users with short packet lengths. We maximize the tota...

In this paper, we study a multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) machine type communication (MTC)-enabled intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) system, where a multi-antenna access point (AP) transmits information symbols to a set of Internet of Things (IoT) users with short packet transmission. In particular, the total energy efficiency (EE)...

In recent years, channel state information (CSI) at sub-6 GHz has been widely exploited for Wi-Fi sensing, particularly for activity and gesture recognition. In this work, we instead explore mmWave (60 GHz) Wi-Fi signals for gesture recognition/pose estimation. Our focus is on the mmWave Wi-Fi signals so that they can be used not only for high data...

The advancement of Virtual Reality (VR) technology is focused on improving its immersiveness, supporting multiuser Virtual Experiences (VEs), and enabling the users to move freely within their VEs while remaining confined to specialized VR setups through Redirected Walking (RDW). To meet their extreme data-rate and latency requirements, future VR s...

A battery-less IoT offers a sustainable alternative to battery-powered IoT devices, which produce billions of dead batteries every year. Devices are instead powered by a small supercapacitor, which is recharged by a renewable energy source. However, since IoT devices are often characterized by intermittent periods of high energy consumption followe...

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is being advanced along the lines of enhancing its immersiveness, enabling multiuser Virtual Experiences (VEs), and supporting unconstrained mobility of the users in their VEs, while constraining them within specialized VR setups through Redirected Walking (RDW). For meeting the extreme data-rate and latency requirem...

Nanoscale devices featuring Terahertz (THz)-based wireless communication capabilities are envisioned to be deployed within human bloodstreams. Such devices are envisaged to enable fine-grained sensing-based applications for detecting events for early indications of various health conditions, as well as actuation-based ones such as the targeted drug...

We are witnessing a surge in the popularity and mass-availability of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Toward enhancing its maturity, current research is focusing on achieving continuous full immersiveness of the VR users during their experiences in Virtual Environments (VEs), as well as on enabling multiuser experiences. In many cases, achieving th...

With the advent of Tiny Machine Learning (tinyML), it is increasingly feasible to deploy optimized ML models on constrained battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices with minimal energy availability. Due to the unpredictable and dynamic harvesting environment, successfully running tinyML on battery-less devices is still challenging. In this pap...

As the need for stand-alone energy harvesting devices increases, the alleviation of the ecological and economic impact of their production and maintenance is possible by increasing battery life while reducing needed battery capacity. However, the increasing energy requirements of far-edge Artificial Intelligence and long-range wireless transmission...

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) setups often include an external source delivering content to a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). "Cutting the wire" in such setups and going truly wireless will require a wireless network capable of delivering enormous amounts of video data at an extremely low latency. The massive bandwidth of higher frequencies, such a...

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) setups often include an external source delivering content to a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). "Cutting the wire" in such setups and going truly wireless will require a wireless network capable of delivering enormous amounts of video data at an extremely low latency. The massive bandwidth of higher frequencies, such a...

Full-immersive multiuser Virtual Reality (VR) envisions supporting unconstrained mobility of the users in the virtual worlds, while at the same time constraining their physical movements inside VR setups through redirected walking. For enabling delivery of high data rate video content in real-time, the supporting wireless networks will leverage hig...

The 6 th generation of wireless communication (6G) is envisioned to give rise to various technologies for improving the end-to-end communication performance, where the communication is envisioned to utilize wireless signals in the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies and above. Among others, these technologies comprise Intelligent Reflective Surfac...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being deployed to provide smart solutions for buildings, logistics, hospitals, and many more. It is growing with billions of connected devices. However, with such tremendous growth, maintenance and support are the hidden burdens. The devices deployed for IoT generally have a light microcontroller, low-power, low memo...

Extended Reality is a revolutionary method of delivering multimedia content to users. A large contributor to its popularity is the sense of immersion and interactivity enabled by having real-world motion reflected in the virtual experience accurately and immediately. This user motion, mainly caused by head rotations, induces several technical chall...

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) multi-Radio Access Technology (RAT) devices combine features of different low-power network technologies to flexibly manage heterogeneous requirements stemming from various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. IEEE 802.11ah is a novel technology that is envisioned to provide a “bridge” between Wi-Fi and s, thus...

Nanoscale wireless networks are expected to revolutionize a variety of domains, with significant advances conceivable in in-body health-care. These nanonetworks will consist of energy-harvesting nan-odevices passively flowing through the bloodstream, taking actions at certain locations, and communicating results to a more powerful Body Area Network...

Achieving extremely high-quality and truly immer-sive interactive Virtual Reality (VR) is expected to require a wireless link to the cloud, providing multi-gigabit throughput and extremely low latency. A prime candidate for fulfilling these requirements is millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, operating in the 30 to 300 GHz bands, rather than th...

Full-immersive multiuser Virtual Reality (VR) envisions supporting unconstrained mobility of the users in the virtual worlds, while at the same time constraining their physical movements inside VR setups through redirected walking. For enabling delivery of high data rate video content in real-time, the supporting wireless networks will leverage hig...

The 6th generation of wireless communication (6G) is envisioned to give rise to various technologies for improving the end-to-end communication performance, where the communication is envisioned to utilize wireless signals in the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies and above. Among others, these technologies comprise Intelligent Reflective Surface...

Tiny battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices that depend on the harvested energy from their environment provide a promising alternative for a sustainable IoT vision. These devices use small capacitors as energy storage, which together with the unpredictable and dynamic harvesting environment results in intermittent on-off behavior of the devi...

Radio Environmental Maps (REMs) are a powerful tool for enhancing the cognitive awareness of various communication and networked agents by providing localized radio measurements of an environment of interest. Generating REMs is a laborious undertaking, especially in complex 3-Dimensional (3D) environments, such as indoors. To address this issue, we...

Deploying low maintenance and long-life systems is an important requirement of emerging commercial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Such systems can be envisioned in which the connected devices are powered by energy harvested from ambient sources and stored in long-lifetime capacitors rather than short-lived and polluting batteries. However, due...

With the emerging deployment of Internet of Things devices, the industry is moving toward batteryless, maintenance-free, and sustainable solutions. Energy harvesting from ambient sources becomes crucial to support the uninterrupted execution of such applications. We choose the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network to analyze a batteryless node us...

The NanoCoCoA 2021 special section covers important and influential topics targeting the enablement of a number of disruptive applications including in-body communication, software-defined metamaterials and metasurfaces, wireless robotic materials, and on-chip communication.. This encapsulates a broad range of expertise, ranging from nanoscale hard...

The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Nanoscale Computing, Communication, and Applications (ACM NanoCoCoA 2021) will be held in conjunction with the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2021) on November 17, 2021. The twofold mission of this workshop is to increase the visibility of nanoscale computing, communication, ne...

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is emerging as an Internet of Things (IoT) technology that effectively connects small devices and sensors. It can enable many smart building use cases such as automation and control, environmental condition monitoring, and indoor location services. The BLE mesh standard provides a friendship feature to support Low Power N...

Tiny energy harvesting battery-less devices present a promising alternative to battery-powered devices for a sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) vision. The use of small capacitors as energy storage, along with a dynamic and unpredictable harvesting environment, leads these devices to exhibit intermittent on-off behavior. As the traditional comput...

Radio Environmental Maps (REMs) are a powerful tool for enhancing the performance of various communication and networked agents. However, generating REMs is a laborious undertaking, especially in complex 3-Dimensional (3D) environments, such as indoors. To address this issue, we propose a system for autonomous generation of fine-grained REMs of ind...

Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDMs) show a strong potential for advancing the engineered control of electromagnetic waves. As such, they are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications, among others in the domains of smart textiles, high-resolution structural monitoring, and sensing in challenging environments. Many of the application...

Full-immersive multiuser Virtual Reality (VR) setups envision supporting seamless mobility of the VR users in the virtual worlds, while simultaneously constraining them inside shared physical spaces through redirected walking. For enabling high data rate and low latency delivery of video content in such setups, the supporting wireless networks will...

While IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks should be equipped to deal with the hard wireless challenges of industrial environments, the sensor networks are often still limited by the characteristics of the used physical (PHY) layer. Therefore, the TSCH community has recently started shifting research efforts to the support of...

Batteryless Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices need to schedule tasks on very limited energy budgets from intermittent energy harvesting. Creating an energy-aware scheduler allows the device to schedule tasks in an efficient manner to avoid power loss during execution. To achieve this, we need insight in the Worst-Case Energy Consumption (WCEC) of ea...

Today's IoT devices rely on batteries, which offer stable energy storage but contain harmful chemicals. Having billions of IoT devices powered by batteries is not sustainable for the future. As an alternative, batteryless devices run on long-lived capacitors charged using energy harvesters. The small energy storage capacity of capacitors results in...

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) setups commonly consist of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) tethered to a content-generating server. "Cutting the wire" in such setups and going truly wireless will require a wireless network capable of delivering enormous amounts of video data at an extremely low latency. Higher frequencies, such as the millimeter-wav...

Recent developments in nanotechnology herald nanometer-sized devices expected to bring light to a number of groundbreaking applications. Communication with and among nanodevices will be needed for unlocking the full potential of such applications. As the traditional communication approaches cannot be directly applied in nanocommunication, several a...

IEEE 802.11ah is a new sub-GHz Wi-Fi technology that provides several advantages over traditional Wi-Fi such as a higher communication range, enhanced scalability, and lower energy consumption, however at the cost of substantially lower throughput. With the aim of simultaneously benefiting from multiple Wi-Fi technologies, recent proposals suggest...

In the Internet of Things (IoT), thousands of devices can be deployed to acquire data from the environment and provide service to several applications in different fields. In many cases, it is desirable that devices are self-sustainable in terms of energy. Therefore,the research community is exploring the possibility of employing battery-less devic...

IEEE 802.11ah, marketed as Wi-Fi HaLow, is a new sub-1GHz Wi-Fi technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), aiming to address the major challenge of the IoT: providing connectivity among a large number of power-constrained stations deployed over a wide area. In order to achieve this goal, several novel features are introduced in IEEE 802.11ah in b...

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is becoming one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) networking technologies. It can support more than 50 000 devices within a cell using licensed spectrum. NB-IoT provides low energy consumption, reliable connectivity and deep indoor coverage for the device, making it a good candidate for IoT use...

The numerous applications of industrial automation have always posed many challenges for wireless connectivity. In the last decade, IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks have provided high reliability and low-power operation in such challenging industrial environments. Typically, TSCH networks employ one modulation at the phys...

Nanoscale wireless networks are expected to revolutionize a variety of domains, with significant advances conceivable in in-body healthcare. In healthcare, these nanonetworks will consist of energy-harvesting nanodevices passively flowing through the bloodstream, taking actions at certain locations, and communicating results to more powerful Body A...

Software-defined metamaterials (SDMs) represent a novel paradigm for real-time control of metamaterials. SDMs are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications in the domains such as smart textiles and sensing in challenging conditions. Many of these applications envisage deformations of the SDM structure (e.g., rolling, bending, stretchi...

The need for cables with high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) headsets remains a stumbling block on the path towards interactive multiuser VR. Due to strict latency constraints, designing fully wireless headsets is challenging, with the few commercially available solutions being expensive. These solutions use proprietary millimeter wave (mmWave) comm...