ISAC-TWG Webinar: Near-field Radio Localization and Mapping with Intelligent Surfaces
Date: 20 June 2025
Time: 7:30 AM ET
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
About this topic:
The next generation of cellular networks promises to revolutionize wireless communication by creating smart radio environments (SREs) through the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). These RISs offer significant benefits, including the ability to optimize the radio channel for specific applications, thereby enhancing overall system performance. For instance, RIS elements can be reconfigured to achieve precise localization and sensing, while simultaneously improving communications in cellular networks. Additionally, with the adoption of large aperture arrays and high frequencies, the traditional plane wave approximation, which is valid in the far field, becomes inadequate. In these scenarios, cellular users are likely to be positioned in the near field relative to base stations and RISs. The resulting wavefront curvature allows for the extraction of both distance and angle-of-arrival information, enabling more accurate source localization with fewer deployed devices (single-anchor localization). This webinar will present recent advancements in near-field localization and sensing for next-generation communication systems. It will begin by exploring the localization fundamental localization limits in RIS-aided systems, followed by a review of algorithms designed for imaging and tracking mobile users. The webinar will also show how optimizing the phase profile of RISs can significantly impact localization performance.
About the presenter:
Anna Guerra received B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electronics, telecommunications, and information technologies from University of Bologna (UNIBO) Bologna, Italy, in 2009, 2012, and 2016, respectively.
She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI) at the University of Bologna. From 2016 to 2021, she was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Bologna. During this period (2018–2020), she was awarded a global Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship for the H2020 AirSens project, spending the project’s outgoing phase at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA. From 2021 to 2024, she was a Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy.
Dr. Guerra received an ERC Starting Grant fellowship for the CUE-GO project in 2023. She has received several awards, including the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (Paris, France), the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE RFID-TA Conference (Pisa, Italy), and the Best Paper Award at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Systems (Montreal, QC, Canada). She serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, and IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.
