Short term courses

The program, organised in collaboration with NTIPRIT and TEC, DoT, provided a comprehensive overview of 5G technology and its future advancements, with a special focus on India’s indigenous 5G network development. The training program was spearheaded by Prof. Rohit Budhiraja from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur, whose research group has played a pivotal role in developing India’s first indigenous 5G network, currently deployed on the institute’s campus. This advanced technology has been successfully transferred to the TATA-Tejas network and the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT). Over the three days, participants gained in-depth insights into the 5G physical layer, network architecture, and the intricate layers through which data is transmitted from the base station to user equipment. The program delved into the nuances of establishing a 5G network connection, coding, modulation, rate matching, and multiple antenna technologies. A significant portion of the training focused on the emerging 5G+ standard, encompassing technologies such as Ambient IoT, AI/ML applications, and high-accuracy positioning systems. Participants were introduced to the inner workings of the 3GPP standardisation body and its working groups, cultivating a comprehensive understanding of the future of wireless communication.

Course Website: [link]

DoT-TSDSI joint workshop series on ‘Advancing 5G towards 6G’ aims to disseminate information about 3GPP Release 19 technology areas and timelines to the Indian technology ecosystem. The goal is to mobilize Indian Industry technologists and Academic researchers to actively participate and contribute to the ongoing and future work at 3GPP. The fourth micro-workshop in the series, being conducted in partnership with IIT Kanpur, will focus on the 3GPP Studies related to ‘Physical Layer Technologies’.

The workshop shall introduce the audience to the latest physical layer technologies from RAN1 (physical layer) perspective which have the potential to be a part of 3GPP Release-19 and beyond releases towards 6G.

Course Website: [link]

Over the last few decades, wireless cellular systems have evolved significantly. The latest generation of mobile standards: 5G cellular networks, is expected to provide manyfolds gain in the data-rate and reliability over past generations. Its key features include network densification, the use of massive MIMO with up to 128 antennas at the base station, and millimeter waves. As we move towards the future, a rise of many interesting but data hungry applications including augmented reality, e-Heath, virtual events is expected to bring stricter requirements on data rates and reliability. Researchers have started exploring what 6G communication will be like. We may see new technologies including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), THz communication, nano-communications.

The course will provide an in-depth exposure to practicing engineers, faculty members and graduate students to the fundamentals of wireless communication and the key advanced wireless techniques behind the successful development of modern 5G systems. Beginning with a brief overview of the basic concepts of wireless communications, multiple access schemes, this course will cover fundamentals of 5G new radio (NR) standard, massive MIMO, and 5G millimeter wave systems.

The course will introduce the potential paths to 6G including THz networks and try to provide a leap into the future about how 6G will look like.

IITK has recently jointly developed the hardware and software from scratch for the indigenous 5G network in a multi-institutional project. The course participants will also get an opportunity to visit the 5G testbed lab and get a first-hand view of the work being done at IITK for not only the 5G network but also beyond it.

Course Website: [link]

Course objectives:

The 5G systems development transcends three domains: theoretical research, numerical simulations and practical system demonstrations. This course aims to be a balanced mixture of theory, simulation and practice, which are required to design, evaluate and finally demonstrate practical 5G cellular networks. The course will provide an in-depth exposure to practicing engineers, faculty members and graduate students to the fundamentals of wireless communication and the key advanced wireless techniques behind the successful development of modern 4G and 5G systems. Beginning with a brief overview of the basic concepts of wireless communications, multiple access schemes, this course will cover fundamentals of 5G new radio (NR) standard, transceiver design for MIMO, massive MIMO, device-to-device systems, and analysis of 5G millimeter wave systems.

Course Website: [link]

Course objectives: The aim of this course is to provide an in depth exposure to practicing engineers, faculty members and graduate students to the latest research and applications of convex optimization techniques, specifically in the area of modern wireless communications, signal processing and networking research. Beginning with a brief overview of the basic concepts of convex sets, functions and duality, this course will comprehensively cover several new applications of convex optimization in wireless communications such as power control , beamforming for MIMO wireless systems, compressive sensing, rate maximization etc. A key aim of the course is to enable students to recognize convex optimization problems arising in these areas and develop low- complexity solutions for problems frequently encountered in practical scenarios. A MATLAB based demonstration session will introduce the participants to the tools and techniques available in modern convex optimization solvers for the above applications.

Prerequisites: None.

Course Website: [link]