Wankai Tang
Southeast University, China
Wankai Tang (Member, IEEE) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2011, 2014, and 2021, respectively. He worked at National Instruments, Shanghai, China, from 2014 to 2016. He is currently with the Faculty of the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University. His research interests include modeling, design and prototyping of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered wireless systems. He received the First Class of the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education of China in 2025, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the IEEE COMSOC Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award and the First Prize of the Science and Technology Award of China Institute of Communications in 2024, the IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award and the IEEE COMSOC Asia-Pacific Outstanding Paper Award in 2023, the China Communications Best Paper Award in 2021, and the Electronics Letters Best Paper Award in 2020.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology provides spatial degrees of freedom for wireless sensing. This talk presents a frequency-domain virtual multichannel (FDVM) concept and an FDVM-MUSIC algorithm for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using a single-RF-chain receiver. The proposed FDVM-MUSIC performs subspace-based DOA estimation directly through harmonics in the frequency domain, avoiding noise enhancement introduced by least-squares channel or beam recovery. A 4.9 GHz prototype system is developed for validation. Simulation results and over-the-air experimental measurements confirm the superior performance and potential of the proposed FDVM-MUSIC for DOA estimation.