Speaker: Dr Zilong Liu (University of Essex, UK)

Title: AFDM: A Promising Backwards-Compatible Waveform for Resilient and Scalable 6G+ Systems

Date :  9/17 (16:10-17:10)

Location: EC2002

Online meeting link: https://meet.google.com/esg-zmno-sxm

Abstract: This talk will introduce affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) modulation, which is one of the most promising backwards-compatible waveforms for highly resilient and scalable 6G+ systems. Specifically, AFDM subsumes the legacy OFDM as a special case and can be efficiently implemented through minimal modification of the OFDM transmitter. By modulating different data symbols over multiple orthogonal chirp subcarriers, AFDM is able to attain the full channel diversity and hence significantly improved error rate performance compared to OFDM. Besides the basic principles, I will introduce a series of recent advances on AFDM including 1) Non-orthogonal AFDM; 2) Generalized spatial modulation aided AFDM (GSM-AFDM); 3) AFDM aided sparse code multiple access (AFDM-SCMA); and MIMO-AFDM in the Face of Hardware Impairments. A real-time lab-environment USRP proof-of-concept implementation of AFDM (against OFDM), developed by the 6G Lab of Essex, will also be shown.

bio: Dr Zilong Liu is an Associate Professor, the 6G Laboratory Manager, and the 2024 Outstanding Mid-Career Researcher in the Faculty of Science and Health, University of Essex, UK. He is/was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, a recipient of the prestigious EPSRC New Investigator Award (NIA) in the UK, and a Consultant to the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), a Japanese Government organisation, on 6G V2X assisted autonomous driving. His research generally lies in the interplay of coding, signal processing, and communications, with a major objective of bridging theory and practice. At Essex, he has led the successful development of real-time over-the-air USRP testbeds of OFDM-SCMA and AFDM, which were demonstrated at MWC’2026 and ICC’2026, respectively. He has widely published in quality journals such as IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, JSAC, JS-TSP, and Proceedings of IEEE. So far, he has made a series of original contributions to waveforms, sequences, and multiple access. Prior to his current post, he was with Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Bachelor, 2000-2004), Tsinghua University (MSc, 2004-2007), Nanyang Technological University Singapore (PhD and postdoc, 2008-2017), University of Melbourne (Visiting PhD, 2012), the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Visiting PhD, 2012), and the University of Surrey (Senior Research Fellow, 2018-2019).  He is/was the Hosting General Chair of IWSDA’2022 (iwsda2022.github.io) and SETA’2024 (seta-2024.github.io), an active  contributor to flagship IEEE conferences (e.g., GLOBECOM’2026, PIMRC’2026, ISIT’2026, ICC’2026, ICCC’2026, WCNC’2026, VTC-Fall’2025, IWSDA’2025) in various roles (e.g., track co-chair, tutorial/keynote speaker, workshop organizer, TPC member), and an Associate Editor for several leading IEEE journals including TWC, TVT, WCL, and OJCOMS. Details of his research can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/zilongliu2357.