Gan Zheng
University of Warwick, UK
Prof. Gan Zheng received the BEng and the MEng from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and the PhD degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from The University of Hong Kong in 2008. He is Professor in Connected Systems with the School of Engineering, University of Warwick, UK. His research interests are in the general areas of signal processing for communications. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers with 18,000+ citations and an H-index of 70. His current research focuses on machine learning and quantum computing for wireless communications, satellite communications, fluid antennas and wireless sensing. He has received six Best Paper Awards from IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Signal Processing Society, including the first recipient for the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award, the 2015 GLOBECOM Best Paper Award, and the 2018 IEEE Technical Committee on Green Communications & Computing Best Paper Award. He was listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics in 2019. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising candidate architecture for providing uniform coverage and reliable user experience in future sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, its large-scale deployment is constrained by channel state information (CSI) acquisition, fronthaul signalling, signal processing and radio-frequency hardware overhead, while conventional antennas offer limited spatial flexibility for multiuser interference mitigation. In this talk, I will introduce a fluid antenna enhanced scalable cell-free massive MIMO architecture, where receiver-side fluid antennas (FAs) provide port-domain reconfigurability effective interference mitigation. FAs at the local access point (AP) enhance uplink reception before distributed combining, while user-side FAs improve downlink reception under local-CSI-based precoding. We will present performance evaluations showing that receiver-side FAs improve both average and 5th-percentile user rates while reducing fixed-antenna and transmit-power requirements, and multi-port aggregation is particularly effective for uplink AP reception. Given that translating port-domain flexibility into performance gains requires effective optimization over a large search space, I will also discuss fast quantum-inspired methods for port selection and aggregation to further enhance interference mitigation and system performance.