News

Dr.-Ing. Gui Zhou attended the 2025 IEEE 26th International Workshop on Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence in Wireless Communications (IEEE SPAWC 2025), 7-10 July 2025. She presented her work on “Channel Estimation for mmWave Pinching-Antenna Systems” with co-authors Vasilis K. Papanikola...

On June 16, 2025, Dr.-Ing. Gui Zhou, postdoctoral researcher at IDC, was invited by Vasilis K. Papanikolaou to visit the lab of Prof. George Kargiannidis at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. During the visit, Gui delivered a talk titled: “Radar Rainbow Beams for Wideband mmWave Communica...

As part of the HORIZON-MSCA Staff Exchange (SE) program, Dr.-Ing. Gui Zhou visited Durham University on June 3rd, 2025. Both FAU and Durham University are partner institutions in this EU project. During the visit, Dr. Zhou delivered a talk titled “Radar Rainbow Beams for Wideband mmWave Communicatio...

IDC member Dr.-Ing. Gui Zhou has been awarded the prestigious IEEE Signal Processing Society Best PhD Dissertation Award 2024 for her doctoral thesis titled: “Transmission Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Systems.” Congratulations! This award recognizes outstanding Ph...

As part of the HORIZON-MSCA Staff Exchange (SE) program, Dr.-Ing. Gui Zhou visited the University of Padova on May 8, 2025. The Mid-Term Meeting of the UNITE project was held in the morning, aiming to assess project progress against initial objectives, address implementation challenges, and engage w...

On 7 June 2025, as part of its annual celebration, Die Junge Akademie welcomed ten young scientists and artists into its ranks as members while simultaneously celebrating its 25th anniversary. One of the newly elected members is IDC researcher Maximilian Schäfer. Die Junge Akademie was founded in 2...

This year, the 2nd Workshop on Molecular, Biological and Multi-Scale Communication (WMBMC) took place directly after ICC. The workshop was co-organised by Dr-Ing. Maximilian Schäfer and took place at the University of Montreal on June 12 - 13. Prof. Robert Schober gave an invited talk on our ongoing...

The IDC was strongly represented at this year’s International Conference on Communications (ICC 2025), held in Montreal, Canada. Our participation spanned leadership roles and scientific contributions. ICC is one of two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society (COMSOC), alongside Glob...

Former IDC member Dr.-Ing. Nikita Shanin has received the best Ph.D. Thesis award at the EuCNC & 6G summit! Congratulations! More than 40 recent Ph.D. graduates submitted their applications this year. The jury composed of professors and industry representatives selected the top five  applicants...

We’re proud to share that our former colleague, Kenneth Mayer, has successfully defended his dissertation on May 12, 2025, earning the degree of Dr.-Ing. In his thesis, "System Design and Signal Processing to Facilitate Health Monitoring via Wearable IoT Devices," Kenneth Mayer tackled key challenge...

As part of the student evaluation of courses in the winter semester 2024/2025, the IDC achieved particularly outstanding results in two courses. The Digital Communications lab, led by Dr.-Ing. Clemens Stierstorfer, Hans Rosenberger, Lukas Brand, Gui Zhou, and Brikena Kaziu achieved second place in t...

Timo Jakumeit has received a travel grant from the IEEE Communications Society to attend the 2nd Workshop on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communication (MBMC) in Montreal, where he will present his research on molecular communications. The funding will help cover travel and accommodation c...

Johanna Fröhlich was awarded the Best Paper Award of the Sustainability Track at the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) 2025 for her contribution titled "Spicing Up LLMs: the Role of PAPRICA Pruning in Linear Computation Coding". The work addresses the challenge of reducing the computa...

The VDE Young Net organized a trip to Helgoland from April 10 to 12, 2025, which was also attended by Moritz Garkisch from the IDC. The group of 20 early-career professionals and doctoral students met on Thursday morning in Cuxhaven to take the MS Helgoland ferry to the island. In addition to netwo...

On March 31, 2025, the 6G-Valley innovation cluster was officially launched at a kick-off event hosted by FAU and Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen. The event brought together partners from academia, industry, and government to showcase early contributions to pave the way to 6G, the next generation of mobi...

From April 9–11, 2025, several researchers of the Institute for Digital Communications (IDC) had the pleasure of attending the 9th Workshop on Molecular Communications, held at the University of Catania, Italy. The MolCom workshop serves as platform for interdisciplinary exchange in the field of mol...

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has selected eight new Priority Programs (“Schwerpunktprogramm”, SPP) to begin in 2026. One of these programs, “Holistic Design of Molecular Communication Systems”, will be coordinated at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and is led by Prof....

Maximilian Schäfer, postdoctoral researcher at IDC, gave an invited talk at the 2025 6G-life and 6G-RIC Workshop on Post-Shannon Theory and Molecular Communication, held at TU Braunschweig from March 31st to April 4th. He gave an introduction to molecular communication and the Internet of Bio-Nano T...

The research project ERMES, led by Dr. Maximilian Schäfer at IDC, is featured in the latest issue of the Bayerisches Ärzteblatt—the official journal of the Bavarian Medical Association, reaching physicians and healthcare professionals across Bavaria. The interdisciplinary and international ERMES ...

Prof. Robert Schober was elected as Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. The European Academy of Sciences and Arts is a non-governmental, European association committed to promoting scientific and societal progress. Founded in 1990 as a learned society, its 2,000 members are leading ...

Several IDC researchers attended the 14th International ITG Conference on Systems, Communications, and Coding (SCC) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. SCC 2025 is organized by the Information Technology Group (ITG) of the German Association for Electrical, Electronic, and Infor...

As part of the 6G Research and Innovation Cluster (6G-RIC), Ata Kahlili and Moritz Garkisch visited RWTH Aachen for two days, from March 11th to 12th, 2025. On the first day, the meeting was divided into six subgroups, each focusing on a different topic. Each group discussed the latest technical ...

The Institute for Digital Communications (IDC) hosted a two-day project status meeting for the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) project from Monday, February 24 to Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg! The IoBNT project aims to develop a communication platform for connecting the hu...

Andreas Feder attended this year’s IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), a core conference of IEEE Communications Society, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. He successfully presented his latest work titled “Blind Roll-Off Factor Estimation for Paired Carrier Multiple Access Satel...

Welcome to an exciting journey into the world of synthetic molecular communication and the creation of the Internet of Cells! The course "Building the Internet of Cells with Synthetic Molecular Communication" is offered jointly by FAU and TUM and will introduce you to the latest scientific discoveri...

Prof. Robert Schober received an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor honoris causa) for his contributions to wireless and molecular communications from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. The degree was awarded in a solemn ceremony on December 19, 2024. After Profs. Markos Papageorgiou and Athanasi...

Hedieh Ajam won 2nd place in the IEEE Communications Society’s Four-Minute-Thesis (4MT) competition. The 4MT competition challenges PhD students to explain their research project to a non-specialist audience in just four minutes. The competition is held in two rounds. In the first round, contestants...

IDC was well represented at the 2024 IEEE Global Communication Conference (GLOBECOM) in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. GLOBECOM is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. Hedieh Ajam, Ata Khalili, and Lukas Brand presented their new work during the Symposium Technical...

Prof. Dr. Robert Schober has been listed on the "Highly Cited Researchers List 2024". This list, compiled by Clarivate Analytics, includes the world's most influential researchers whose work is frequently cited by their peers. Prof. Schober is the only researcher in Germany recognized in the categor...

Recently, Sebastian Lotter, postdoctoral researcher at IDC, was invited to visit the lab of Prof. George Kargiannidis at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. During his visit, Sebastian got the chance to attend the defense of a Master thesis on Molecular Communication and he delivered a tal...

In a recent presentation at the Thinknet 6G Summit 2024 in Munich, Prof. Schober discussed the relevance of Molecular Communication for future wireless communication networks. The event was organized by "bayern innovativ".

Teena tom Dieck was awarded the VDE Bayern Award 2024 for her Master’s Thesis titled “Optical-to-Chemical Signal Modulation with Functionalized Nanodevices” supervised by Dr. Maximilian Schäfer, Lukas Brand, Prof. Dr. Kathrin Castiglione, and Prof. Dr. Robert Schober. The thesis was conducted in coo...

Ata Khalili has been awarded a travel grant to attend IEEE Globecom 2024, where he will present his accepted paper entitled "Advanced ISAC Design: Movable Antennas and Accounting for Dynamic RCS". The conference will be held December 8-12 in Cape Town, South Africa. IEEE Globecom is recognized as a ...

The current issue of the  FAU Magazine contains an article entitled 'Moleküle auf Sendung' (Molecules on air) about two new IDC research projects on molecular communication. Specifically, the article reports on the Research Training Group ‘Synthetic Molecular Communications Across Different Scales: ...

Teena tom Dieck and Maximilian Schäfer presented their work at the 11th ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (NanoCom), held in Milan, Italy, from October 28–30, 2024. NanoCom is one of the premier conferences for the interdisciplinary molecular communications commun...

On 11th of November, Timo Jakumeit gave a talk to 11th-grade W-Seminar students on "Molecular Communication (MC) - How Communication Engineering Can Be Used to Develop Novel Technologies in Medicine". The presentation covered the basics of MC, a comparison to electromagnetic communication, and the f...

Maximilian Schäfer, Fardad Vakilipoor, Bastian Heinlein, and Timo Jakumeit recently visited the lab of Silke Harteis at the University of Regensburg. This visit is part of an ongoing collaboration on an in vivo 3D testbed for molecular communication using the Chorioallantoic Membrane Model. They exp...

On 29 October 204, the IDC hosted an insightful MATLAB workshop led by Dr. Alberto Álvarez Polegre of MathWorks Inc. The session, entitled 'Modelling Advanced Wireless Communications in Teaching and Research', focused on using MATLAB to simulate and analyse advanced wireless communication systems, c...

Timo Jakumeit from the Institute for Digital Communications has won the IEEE ComSoc MBMC-TC (Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications Technical Committee) logo competition. Out of five submissions in the final short list, Timo's logo received the highest number of votes, with 38.4% of t...

Brikena Kaziu attended this fall's IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC), one of the semi-annual flagship conferences of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, in Washington DC, USA. She successfully presented her latest work titled "Approximate Partially Decentralized Linear EZF Precoding for Mass...

Johanna Fröhlich won 2nd place in the Green ICT Award 2024 from Forschungsfabrik Mikroelektronik Deutschland (FMD) for her bachelor thesis "Algorithms for Matrix Decomposition for Computational Coding". This thesis introduces algorithms to reduce the computational cost during the inference phase of ...

Will sensors in the body be able to permanently monitor whether new tumours develop after cancer treatment? An international research consortium, including the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), is working to make such visions a reality. Over the next three years, the partners ...

From Wednesday, 9 October 2024 to Friday, 11 October 2024, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Schober and Moritz Garkisch participated in the 6G Research and Innovation Cluster (6G-RIC) meeting at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin. On Wednesday and Thursday, the latest ideas and approaches ...

The Institute for Digital Communications at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg offers two exciting internship positions in the field of molecular communications for undergraduate students from North America, Great Britain and Ireland. These internships are funded by the DAAD (German...

As part of the ongoing Internet of Bio-Nano-Things (IoBNT) project, IDC's Maximilian Schäfer, Sebastian Lotter, and Timo Jakumeit recently attended a workshop at the Media Docks in Lübeck. The two-day event featured engaging sessions on molecular communication in medical applications and collaborati...

On October 10th and 11th the joint annual Igel seminar of IDC and LMS took place again. During these two days in Osternohe, we heard interesting talks about research topics from (new) staff members of both chairs. The talks gave insights into different topics ranging from signal processing and machi...

Our former colleague Aravindh Krishnamoorthy has taken the final step towards obtaining the degree of Dr.-Ing. On Thursday, September 26, 2024, he successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Non-orthogonal Precoding and Decoding Schemes for 5G and Beyond Downlink MIMO Communication Systems”. ...

IDC is offering a seminar on "The Internet of BioNanoThings for Next Generation Health Care Solutions" this winter semester. Students from Bachelor and Master programs can apply for this seminar on the website of the Department EEI from September 23 to October 6, 2024. For more details, see the full post!

Kenneth Mayer, Amine Lahmeri, and Lukas Brand attended and successfully presented their work at this year's IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society, in Denver, Colorado, USA. Robert Schober, President of the IEEE Co...

Amine Lahmeri and Lukas Brand won 3rd and 1st place, respectively, in the IEEE Communications Society's Four-Minute-Thesis (4MT) competition. The 4MT competition challenged graduate students to explain their research topic to a broad, non-specialist audience in just 4 minutes. In the preliminary rou...

IDC researchers Nikita Shanin, Hedieh Ajam, Vasilis K. Papanikolaou, Laura Cottatellucci, and Robert Schober have received Best Paper Award 2023 from the TAOS technical committee (TC) of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) for their Globecom 2023 paper: “EH Modelling and Achievable Rate for FSO...

IDC offers several open HIW positions in the exciting new interdisciplinary research field of molecular communication. You are interested? Then get in touch with Dr. Sebastian Lotter!

Our former colleague Nikita Shanin has taken the final step towards obtaining the degree of Dr.-Ing. On Friday, May 17, 2024, he successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Optimal Design of Communication Systems Based on Wireless Power Transfer with Non-linear Energy Harvesting”. Nikita, who was supervised by both Prof. Cottatellucci and Prof. Schober, investigated and optimized methods of wirelessly transmitting energy to small sensors placed in remote locations or perhaps inside the human body to recharge their batteries.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has approved the project "Innovative test platform for molecular communication and microsurgical training - fluorescence systems, novel prostheses and technologies" with funding of more than half a million euros for the years 2024-2026. IDC molecular communication researchers led by Dr.-Ing. Max Schäfer contribute to this innovative, interdisciplinary project.

The lab course "Digital Communication" was evaluated very well in the winter semester 2022/23 and ranked 2nd in the teaching evaluation of the FAU Faculty of Engineering.

Former and current IDC members Alex Yu, Dongfang Xu, Ying Sun, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, and Robert Schober received the IEEE ComSoc Leonard G. Abraham Prize for their paper “Robust and Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 38, no. 11, pp.2637-2652, Nov. 2020.