The group of Radio Systems (RS) within the University of Twente (UT) has a vacancy for a PhD with the aim to define a novel framework for joint communication and sensing at millimeter-wave (and sub-THz) frequencies. With the advancement of millimeter-wave and sub-THz communications, radio devices with a large bandwidth, a larger number of antenna array elements and beamforming are also suitable for high accuracy localization and sensing. Integrating high resolution radar sensing to high-speed communication systems could make the wireless connectivity more reliable (e.g., blockage prevention); telecommunication infrastructure that is capable of multi-task sensing (e.g., environment mapping, detection, localization and tracking, pose recognition, vital sign estimation) could also enable vertical services like remote health monitoring and autonomous driving. With the next generation joint communication and sensing (JCAS) systems, both the communication and sensing performances are expected to increase.

Despite promising, there are a lot of open challenges and also new technical requirements. Recent advances in MIMO, millimeter-wave and sub-THz communication, radars, artificial intelligence, among others, will be the technical foundation for this promising direction. However, how much performance boost can we expect for communication/sensing? What are the trade-offs? What new signal processing techniques or design principles do we need? How about the power and resource consumption? What are the security and privacy concerns?

The candidate will tackle the open challenges of JCAS, with a focus on hardware prototyping, proof-of-concept, JCAS system and performance optimization. He/she will connect wireless communications and radar (and maybe also data science) communities in order to seek synergies and novel solutions/designs.