Boya Di
Peking University, China
Boya Di (Senior Member, IEEE) is an Assistant Professor with Peking University, China. She received the B.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree from Peking University. She was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with Imperial College London. Her current research interests include metasurfaces-enabled communications and sensing, aerial access networks. She was a recipient of the 2022 IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award, the 2023 IEEE ComSoc TCCN Publication Award, and 2024 IEEE GlobeCom Best Paper Award. She serves as the Vice Chair APB of IEEE TCCN TC. She also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicle Technology, an Editor for IEEE Communications Tutorials and Surveys and IEEE Internet of Things Journal.
High-frequency bands, such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands, are envisioned as a cornerstone of sixth-generation (6G) networks, offering abundant bandwidth for ultra-high-rate communication and high-accuracy sensing. To compensate for the severe path loss, massive antenna arrays are deployed to provide significant beamforming gains, whose large apertures, together with the short wavelength in high-frequency bands, substantially extend the near-field region. However, since high-frequency signals suffer from weak diffraction and high penetration loss, existing near-field beams, which propagate along straight lines, experience severe energy loss once the line-of-sight (LoS) path is blocked. To address this critical issue, blockage resilient wavefront engineering has recently emerged as a promising paradigm. This talk will discuss how these beams can be realized with practical antenna hardware architectures, including phased-array-based massive MIMO and reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS)-based holographic MIMO, and investigate how their distinct physical characteristics influence the associated beam design.