On the afternoon of November 21, 2021, China International Joint Research Center of Green Communications and Networking held the annual academic committee and advisory committee conference at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). In the meeting, the experts and committee members evaluated the achievements made by the center in 2021, and put forward some valuable suggestions on the further construction of the center.
Liang Qian, Vice-president of HUST, extended his warm welcome and sincere gratitude to the committee members and experts attending the meeting, and spoke highly of the development of the School of Electronic Information and Communications (EIC) and the center. He hoped that EIC and the center can conduct deeper and closer cooperation with the experts here. Hong Jingyi, Vice-Secretary General of Chinese Institute of Electronics, expressed that the institute will build the bridge of industry-education-research-practice with its resources to promote the international collaboration on science and technology in China. Qiu Caiming, Dean of EIC, gave an introduction to EIC and the center and the outstanding achievements made by them in teaching and scientific research. He emphasized that to promote the development of mobile communications industry, we should maintain the long-term international cooperation so as to lay the solid foundation of talents, science and technology.
Professor Ge Xiaohu, Director of the center, summarized the progress made by the center in 2021. On the problems in communication network in achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, he introduced not only the achievements made by the center in research, scientific projects, cooperation with companies, talent training as well as international collaboration, but also the future plan of the center in the new situation.
Professor Liu Yingzhuang gave a report on indoor short-range wireless communication system and key technologies. He pointed out that although the performance of 5G improved significantly, it still faces serious challenges. Although short-range communication technologies such as WiFi have good performance and energy-saving characteristics, there are serious interference problems at the same time. It is urgent to jointly optimize the physical layer and MAC layer and design new short-range wireless communication standards.
Professor Yin Haifan gave a report on the reconfigurable intelligent surface-based wireless communication prototype system and its experiment results. He pointed out that reconfigurable intelligent surface can efficiently save the high energy consumption problem of 5G, and introduced the reconfigurable intelligent surface-based wireless communication prototype system developed by his team. The design is based on the codebook’s beamforming, and a greedy algorithm for beamforming is proposed, which achieves significant performance gain.
Professor Xiao Yong gave a report on semantic communication theory based on knowledge reasoning. He pointed out that semantics is universal, computable and inferential, and systematically introduced his team's in-depth research and related achievements on the basis of semantic complement-based semantic rate distortion theory, semantic basis-based semantic communication model, semantic reasoning-based semantic communication coding.
Zeng Yongmei from Huawei gave a report on challenges of and thoughts on wireless energy conservation and emission reduction. She pointed out that in the shift of attention from energy consumption to carbon emission, it is more necessary to pay attention to carbon emission from operation energy consumption to the whole life cycle. The design of the system needs to meet the demands, consider the energy network as a part of the wireless network, and reasonably set the goal and evaluate the effect.
After the reports, academician Zhang Ping, Director of the academic committee of the center, pointed out that research should start from the essence of communications, and then put forward questions and solve problems. Then, committee members had a heated discussion. They reached consensus that the energy conservation and emission reduction of communication network is important to achieve the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, and emphasized that green communication networking and the goal should be combined to conduct research. At the same time, international collaboration should be further enhanced and an open academic exchange environment should be built. Moreover, national key and major scientific projects should be planed to apply for in advance.
The conference strengthened the communication between academia and industry, and let more experts and researchers know the world-leading scientific achievements made by the center in green communication and networking during the past years. It plays an important role in discipline development, talent training, "cross research center" construction and high-level academic research. Through this meeting, consensus has been reached that the center, following the “14th Five-Year-Plan” will strive to achieve the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality and promote the high-quality development of EIC and the center.
