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Workshop on Bridging MIMO Signal Processing, Hardware Design, and Physically Consistent Modeling @ ICASSP 2026

May 4
Workshop at ICASSP 2026: Bridging MIMO signal processing, hardware design and physically consistent modelling, 4 May 2026.

The half-day workshop is a satellite workshop associated with ICASSP 2026.

The workshop aims to unite academic and industrial researchers, students, and professionals who are working on or are interested in the state-of-the-art, research challenges, and expected evolution of multi-antenna communications. The workshop has a cross-disciplinary scope that connects MIMO signal processing with hardware design, circuit theory, and EM theory.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a cornerstone of modern wireless systems and is set to play an even greater role in 6G and beyond. As these systems evolve, extremely large MIMO (XL-MIMO) and holographic MIMO are emerging as key technologies. XL-MIMO leverages physically large, dense antenna arrays with thousands of elements with sub-wavelength spacing to achieve unprecedented spectral and energy efficiency, while holographic MIMO replaces traditional arrays with continuous surfaces capable of full electromagnetic wave manipulation. These paradigms demand physically consistent models grounded in circuit and EM theory, moving beyond the simplifications traditionally used in wireless communications.

This half-day workshop will explore the integration of MIMO signal processing, hardware design, and physically consistent modelling, highlighting the need for both hardware-aware algorithm design and algorithm-aware hardware architectures. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the challenges and opportunities of operating at the interface of signal processing and physical-layer realism. The programme features three invited talks from leading researchers, paper presentations selected through an open call, and a panel discussion on future research directions.

Programme

09:00–09:05 Opening
09:05–09:40 Invited presentation: Angel Lozano
09:40–10:15 Invited presentation: Josef A. Nossek
10:15–10:30 Paper 1
10:30–11:00 Coffee break
11:00–11:35 Invited presentation: Davide Dardari
11:35–11:50 Paper 2
11:50–12:05 Paper 3
12:05–12:30 Panel discussion

Invited Speakers

Angel Lozano

Professor, Department of Engineering, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain)
Title: “Channel Estimation for XL MIMO: A Middle Way”
Abstract: With the frequency and array apertures growing steadily larger, the number of antenna elements per array has gone from a handful to hundreds, and soon thousands. The associated channel estimation problem, which used to be a rather trivial task, is fast becoming a critical challenge. And, compounding the difficulty, the time-honoured far-field assumption mostly ceases to hold in these situations, and the wavefront curvature is revealed over the arrays. This lecture presents an original approach that is perfectly suited to the estimation of large-dimensional near-field channels. Specifically, by expressing the curved wavefront as a polynomial via a power series expansion of a sphere, the estimation can be cast as a multidimensional polynomial phase estimation problem. The application of a tailored polynomial phase estimator, able to handle arbitrary dimensions and polynomial degrees, yields an excellent trade-off between channel estimation accuracy and complexity.

Josef A. Nossek

Emeritus of Excellence, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
Title: “Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces and Circuit Theory”
Abstract: Information theory serves well as the mathematical theory of communication. However, it contains no provision that makes sure its theorems are consistent with the physical laws that govern any existing realisation of a communication system. Therefore, it may not be surprising that applications of information theory or signal processing, as currently practised, easily turn out to be inconsistent with fundamental principles of physics, such as the law of conservation of energy. It is the purpose of multiport communication theory to provide the necessary framework ensuring that applications of signal processing and information theory actually do comply with physical law. This framework involves a circuit theoretic approach where the inputs and outputs of the communication system are associated with ports of a multiport black box. Thanks to each port being described by a pair of two instead of just one variable, consistency with physics can be maintained. The connection to information theory and signal processing is then obtained by means of isomorphisms between mathematical symbols of the latter and the physical quantities of the multiport model such as transmit power and noise covariance. The principles of the multiport communication theory are presented and accompanied by a discussion of interesting results of its application to wireless links supported by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS).

Davide Dardari

Professor, Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi”, University of Bologna (Italy)
Title: “Wave-Domain Multifunctional Electromagnetic Signal Processing for XL-MIMO”
Abstract: While XL-MIMO represents a promising technology to improve the communication and sensing performance of next-generation wireless systems, it poses several challenges from both technological and sustainability perspectives. Thanks to the introduction of new reconfigurable antenna and metamaterial technologies, an interesting research direction is to shift part of the signal processing directly to the wave domain. This talk will provide an overview of physically consistent modelling, fundamental limits, and optimisation approaches for reconfigurable electromagnetic systems enabling multifunctional wave-domain processing. Some numerical examples related to beamforming, MISO, and MIMO precoding will be presented to illustrate the potential of this concept.

Papers

  1. Anzheng Tang, Shenghui Song, Chi-Ying Tsui, Rodrigo C. de Lamare, and Merouane Debbah, “Channel Estimation for Holographic MIMO Systems with Mutual Coupling Awareness”
  2. Francesco Verde, Donatella Darsena, Marco Di Renzo, and Vincenzo Galdi, “Optimal Transmit Field Distribution for Partially Obstructed Continuous Radiating Surfaces in Near-Field Communication Systems”
  3. Ruiding Hou, Jiaheng Wang, Sen Wang, Yongming Huang, Yutong Zhang, Liang Xia, and Jing Jin, “Linear WMMSE MIMO Precoding with One-Bit DACs”

Organisers

Italo Atzeni

Italo Atzeni
Associate Professor, Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu (Finland)

George C. Alexandropoulos

George C. Alexandropoulos
Associate Professor, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece)
Adjunct Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago (USA)

Robert W. Heath, Jr.

Robert W. Heath, Jr.
Professor and Charles Lee Powell Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego (USA)

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