Signal Processing

Yazhou Zhu Successfully Accomplished his Doctoral Defense

On 17 January 2023, Yazhou Zhu, a research assistant at our institute, accomplished his doctoral defense. The dissertation is entitled “Distributed Resource Optimization for NOMA Transmission in Beamforming SATCOM.” The dissertation investigated the incorporation of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with existing Beamforming-SATCOM for higher throughput and more user connectivity. More importantly, the dissertation provided insights into resource optimization strategies with user fairness objectives for non-orthogonal SATCOM. The results demonstrated that the benefit of NOMA is achievable in overloaded multi-beam satellite systems since the high user channel correlation is generally inherent in multibeam geo-satellite systems. The dissertation delivers a basis for further research in non-orthogonal SATCOM. The doctoral defense committee was headed by the committee chair Prof. Stefan Schäffler in the presence of the two examiners, i.e., Prof. Andreas Knopp and Jun.-Prof. Christian Hofmann. Yazhou Zhu began his research at our institute in May 2018. Currently, he is employed at GPP Communication as a software engineer in digital and analog signal processing.

Congratulations to Dr.-Ing. Tony Colin

On the 15th of December 2022, Mr. Colin successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled „A Unified Mathematical Framework for Link Budget Analysis and Optimization in Satellite Communications Systems.“
In particular, his thesis lays the foundation for more accurate and optimized communications links for next-generation satellite systems. This work is especially beneficial to satellite manufacturers by providing tools to accelerate the satellite development process and valuable to satellite operators by enabling higher capacity performances for future satellites.
Based on his excellent contribution and his outstanding performance in the final qualifying examination, Mr. Colin convinced the jury composed of Jun.-Prof. Hofmann (Chairman, UniBw) and the examiners Prof. Bernd Friedrichs (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Prof. Barry Evans (University of Surrey) and Prof. Andreas Knopp (Supervisor, UniBw M). They awarded him the doctoral degree with the highest distinction (summa cum laude). Tony Colin works as a freelancer and satellite technology consultant at Spacecom Consulting a consulting company created in August 2022.

Best Publication Award 2022

December 2022: The Institute for Information Technology awarded the “Best Publication 2022 Award” to the authors Yazhou Zhu, Christian A. Hofmann, and Andreas Knopp for the paper "Distributed Resource Optimization for NOMA Transmission in Beamforming SATCOM" in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. This paper is part of the special issue on next-generation multiple access. This work investigated the incorporation of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with existing Beamforming-SATCOM for higher throughput and more user connectivity. More importantly, this work gave insights into resource optimization methods with user fairness objectives for non-orthogonal SATCOM. The results demonstrated that the benefit of NOMA is achievable in overloaded satellite systems since the high user channel correlation is generally inherent in a multibeam geo-satellite system.