Waves, Physics, Information, and Computation

Objective

From Marconi’s telegraph without wires to today’s cellular networks, wireless communication has shaped our world, with deep impacts on virtually all aspects of society. This astonishing development is the result of parallel progress in physics (propagation, antennas, radio-frequency (RF) devices, semiconductors) and engineering (information theory, digital signal processing, computer architectures). Nevertheless, the ever-growing demand for wireless capacity is pushing the current technology towards unsurmountable barriers in hardware complexity and power consumption, such that the present trend will soon become unsustainable. In order to overcome these barriers, radically new approaches are needed. Building on the highly complementary research of the four PIs in a synergistic manner, spanning the physics of RF wave manipulation via metasurfaces, the physics-consistent modeling of devices and communication channels, the investigation of information theoretic fundamental limits of reliable communication and sensing, and the design of efficient signal processing and coding algorithms and of the hardware computational platforms to achieve such limits, Waves, Physics, Information, and Computation (WePhICom) shall lay out the fundamental theory and experimental validation for a new sustainable path to the next wireless communication evolution cycle. We shall develop a fresh look at the problem of information transmission and environment/parameter sensing via electromagnetic waves supported by the recent progress in metasurfaces. The ambition of WePhICom is to lay the physical and information theoretic/algorithmic foundations for the next “quantum leap”of wireless communication technology, paving a sustainable way to support the needs of the information age of tomorrow.