Prof Tian Hong Loh, NPL

Metrology for 5G and emerging wireless technologies

Biography

Prof Tian Hong Loh received the PhD degree in engineering from the University of Warwick, UK in 2005. He has been with the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) since 2005 as a Higher Research Scientist (2005 - 2009) and Senior Research Scientist (2009 - 2017). He is currently a Principal Research Scientist at NPL.

He leads work at NPL on a wide range of applied and computational electromagnetic metrology research areas to support the telecommunications industry. He has authored and co-authored over hundred refereed publications and holds five patents.

His research interests include 5G communications, MIMO, smart antennas, small antennas, metamaterials, body-centric communications, WSN, EMC, and computational electromagnetics.

He is currently visiting professor at Surrey University, visiting industrial fellow at Cambridge University, UK representative of URSI Commission A (Electromagnetic Metrology), project coordinator of an EU H2020 co-funded project on ‘Metrology for 5G Communications’, and senior member of the IEEE. He is an associate editor of IET Communications Journal and was the TPC chair of 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Electromagnetics. He also has acted on the session chair and technical programme committee for several international conferences, and as technical reviewer for several international journals on these subjects.

Synopsis

High bandwidth mobile communication is an essential tool for wealth creation. Focusing on user experience, the fifth generation (5G) communications promise to deliver millisecond latency, multi-Gbps data capacity, low energy consumption, and seamless connectivity between billions of people and trillions of devices.

Several standards bodies (e.g. 3GPP, ETSI, IEEE, etc.) and worldwide research communities (e.g. 5G-PPP, IMT-2020, 5G Americas, etc.) are facing the challenge of diverse 5G technological requirements. To develop the necessary infrastructure and standards for 5G and beyond they have started seeking for a global consensus over visions, applications, standards, and identification of suitable spectrums.

Metrology to underpin all aspects from signals, devices to systems is essential for the development, manufacture and deployment of 5G and emerging wireless technologies. In particular, testing at mm-wave bands presents challenges over antenna and propagation characterisation due to their higher losses at these frequencies. A raft of new technologies is anticipated to be considered in both sub-6GHz and millimetre wave (mm-wave) spectrum bands to support a significantly increased user density.

This talk gives an overview of metrological capabilities and testbeds developed under several UK and EU programmes as well as overview of other international effort. The topics to cover include signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), sub-6GHz multiple-input-multiple-output over-the-air (MIMO-OTA), massive MIMO & mm-wave MIMO testbeds, smart antenna & mm-wave hybrid beamforming phased array testbeds, etc.