Publication date: 
2023/04/13
A prestigious European grant of 2.7 million euros (approx. 63.5 million crowns) for research on systems for 6G networks has been awarded to an international team led by Prof. Stanislav Zvánovec from the Department of Electromagnetic Fields, FEL CTU. The project, which involves universities and companies from various European countries, was successful in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grants competition under the Horizon 2020 programme.

"We ranked between two and five percent of the best projects," said Prof. Zvánovec. The ambitious four-year project is just beginning and, according to the scientist, it also represents an interesting career opportunity for future PhD students in related fields.

"The project is called Optical and Wireless Sensors Networks for 6G scenarios (OWIN6G) and is a PhD project. There are 10 partners, seven teams from universities and three from industry, but those from industry have to be linked to another university at the same time. These teams will receive a portion of the funding, each of them for one new PhD student, and this will create a network of teams collaborating on individual work packages," described Stanislav Zvánovec, who is also the principal investigator and coordinator of the project with his wireless and fibre optics group.

The scientist described that the grant will support research on sensor networks for the sixth generation and will focus on wireless optics as well as millimetre-wave radio transmission. "For this, we will simultaneously develop either the sensors themselves, solar cells for energy harvesting and optical detection, and hybrid RF-optical wireless technologies or machine learning applications to improve signal reception," Prof Zvanovec said. These sensors, he said, will have future applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), smart home devices, home care and smart city, and will integrate the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE) as part of 6G technologies. "In addition to focusing on new sensors, we will also look at security aspects in sensor networks," the expert added.

Regarding the organization of the project, Zvánovec said that each student involved will spend up to 12 months of his or her doctoral studies on research internships at universities or industrial partners in other countries. "This is to gain the best possible knowledge shared by experts across the whole project," the scientist noted.  "It's a great opportunity also for the students finishing here at FEL. Although they will not be able to join our team directly, due to the requirement of a previous master's degree in another country, they have nine other places open at foreign universities in Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Portugal or Greece," as Zvánovec then pointed out.

The selection of collaborating PhD students will be made through a selection procedure on the European portal Euraxess. According to the scientist, the pre-selection has already started. Prof. Zvánovec himself will lead four new PhD students as a supervisor or specialist in the project.

Stanislav Zvánovec also pointed out that even for his "seasoned" research team the topic of the project is a great challenge. "It is new for me in that we are getting outside our comfort zone of optical communication or millimetre links alone. For example, my PhD topic combines all of the above with an overlap into the creation of a virtual space that tries to combine all the knowledge from both communication and network technologies on the principle of digital twins and then prevent a whole range of critical situations," explained Prof. Zvánovec. "In most standard projects, we try to develop technologies that we have very well mapped, for example, for subsequent use in industry. However, the OWIN6G project is already at the edge of current knowledge of wireless optical links and sensors," the scientist said.

According to the scientist, most of the top experts involved in the project have collaborated in the past - on joint measurements, publications and international projects. These include the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Ecole Centrale Marseille, and Northumbria University in Newcastle. "In addition to joint scientific work, I am also a specialist tutor for their students," said Prof. Zvánovec.

"For example, we have joint publications in impacted journals with two-thirds of our partners, and our students go on scientific internships with their teams," said Prof. Zvánovec. "And what is more interesting, in recent years, the vast majority of the collaborating students come to us to carry out experiments, because we have managed to build state-of-the-art laboratory facilities combining optical and microwave technology - one that is not available to most European teams," the scientist concluded.

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Contact person: 
Name: 
Radovan Suk
E-mail: 
SUKRADOV@FEL.CVUT.CZ