Xu Zhu
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
Xu (Judy) Zhu received the B.Eng. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, and the Ph.D. degree from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. She is currently a Professor with Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China, also with the Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, Shenzhen, China. Formerly, she was a Reader with the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. She has published three books and over 350 technical papers. Her research interests include MIMO, URLLC, channel estimation, and resource allocation. She was a recipient of the Best Paper Awards from IEEE GLOBECOM 2024 and 2019. She has served as a Distinguished Speaker and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society; an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications; and the Symposium/Track Co-Chair for IEEE ICC 2016, ICC 2019, GLOBECOM 2021, and WCNC 2022.
This speech addresses the vision, challenges, and intelligent solutions for sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. Driven by the explosive growth of heterogeneous devices and mission-critical applications such as autonomous driving and low-altitude intelligent networking, conventional communication paradigms face fundamental bottlenecks including coverage gaps, severe interference, and fast-changing wireless channels. To overcome these challenges, an integrated framework of intelligent connection, transmission, and scheduling is established. For intelligent connection, user-centric cell-free networking and QoS-aware massive random access are adopted to enhance coverage, access success rate, and resource utilization. For reliable transmission, effective channel estimation and prediction methods are developed, together with sparse coding and joint source-channel coding for semantic communications, to achieve high spectral efficiency and robustness in dynamic environments. For intelligent scheduling, multi-domain resource coordination and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) beamforming are employed to optimize spectral and energy efficiency while improving sensing-communication synergy. Validations based on theoretical analysis and hardware testbeds demonstrate significant performance gains.