Abstract – The next generation of wireless cellular systems will be required to comply with
unprecedented requirements in terms of data transfer speed, flexibility, coverage,
reliability, and quality of service. The request to meet such ambitious expectations,
jointly with the need of relying on cost‐effective and efficient technologies, is
motivating a deep re‐visitation of the general guidelines so far considered for the
design of wireless communication systems and their deployment. Indeed, the main actors
of the technological evolution from one to the subsequent mobile communication generation
have been the user terminals and the base stations and network. On the contrary, the
propagation environment has been considered as an uncontrollable element, given a‐priori.
This viewpoint is being completely overrun by the emerging paradigm of the Smart
Electromagnetic Environment (SEE). The SEE vision originates from the key idea that the
propagation of the electromagnetic waves/signals can be tailored by properly controlling
the reflection by buildings and urban structures. In the SEE scenario, the environment
is no longer seen as an uncontrollable part, but rather it can cooperatively support the
propagation to improve the coverage, the data rate, and the network reliability without
the need to install additional base stations.
This talk will review some on‐going activities at the ELEDIA Research Center towards the
implementation of the SEE ranging from the capacity‐driven design of wireless infrastructures,
the synthesis of the ‘smart skin’ for field manipulation and their installation planning,
to the compressive‐processing of sensing and communication signals.
Andrea Massa (IEEE Fellow, IET Fellow, Electromagnetic Academy Fellow) he has been a
Full Professor of Electromagnetic Fields @ University of Trento since 2005. At present, Prof. Massa is the director of the network of federated laboratories “ELEDIA Research Center” located in Brunei, China, Czech, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Perù, Tunisia with more than 150 researchers. Moreover, he is holder of a Chang-Jiang Chair Professorship @ UESTC (Chengdu – China), Professor @ CentraleSupélec (Paris – France), and Visiting Professor @ Tsinghua (Beijing – China). He has been holder of a Senior DIGITEO Chair at L2S-CentraleSupélec and CEA LIST in Saclay (France), UC3M-
Santander Chair of Excellence @ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), Adjunct Professor at Penn State University (USA), Guest Professor @ UESTC (China), and Visiting Professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (USA), the Nagasaki University (Japan), the University of Paris Sud (France), the Kumamoto University (Japan), and the National University of Singapore (Singapore). He has been appointed IEEE AP-S Distinguished Lecturer (2016-2018) and served as Associate Editor of the “IEEE Transaction on Antennas and Propagation” (2011-2014).
His research activities are mainly concerned with inverse problems, antenna analysis/synthesis, radar systems and signal processing, cross-layer optimization and planning of wireless/RF systems, system-by-design and material-by-design (metamaterials and reconfigurable-materials), and theory/applications of optimization techniques to engineering problems (coms, medicine, and biology). Prof. Massa published more than 900 scientific publications among which more than 350
on international journals (> 13.500 citations – h-index = 60 [Scopus]; > 11.000 citations – h-index = 54 [ISI-WoS]; > 22.000 citations – h-index = 87 [Google Scholar]) and more than 550 in international conferences where he presented more than 200 invited contributions (> 40 invited keynote speaker) (www.eledia.org/publications). He has organized more than 100 scientific sessions in international conferences and has participated to several technological projects in the national and international framework with both national agencies and companies (18 international prj, > 5 M€; 8
national prj, > 5 M€; 10
mms-conf.org 