I am an engineer and I hold a Ph.D. on Information and Communication Technologies. I obtained the Telecommunication Engineer degree in 2009 and I am specialized in Communications. The High Telecommunication School of Barcelona at Technical University of Catalunya (ETSETB–UPC) granted me with this degree after five years of study and the Ms.C. Thesis. It was entitled “Suboptimal Power Allocation  for multiuser and multiantenna scenarios” and it obtained the maximum qualification with honors.

In 2012 I obtained the Master of Research on Information and Communication Technologies (MERIT Master) granted by the UPC. The master thesis “Smart Resource Allocation: Beyond the optimum” obtained the maximum qualification with honors.

Five years later, I obtained my Ph.D. on Communications with the Doctoral Thesis “Polarization and Index Modulations: a Theoretical and Practical Perspective“, with special Cum Laude mention. In this dissertation, I present a study and exploitation of the physical polarization dimension by describing fundamental aspects and their implementation.

In parallel to my academic career, I worked for some months in 2009 at the University with a grant developing multiuser techniques in broadcast scenarios under the FP7 European Project Newcom++. In january 2010 I joined the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC). There, I first started implementing a novelty system based on Filterbank Multicarrier modulation, in the European FP7 project entitled PHYDYAS. This implementation was done using a Software Defined Radio platform and coded in C++. Mainly, this system uses a bank of filters for multicarrier modulation instead of OFDM and it supports 10 MHz of bandwidth, MIMO 2×2 and QPSK subcarrier modulation and works nearly in real-time. You can see the results in the following video:

It was an excellent chance to lead the SDR unit at CTTC, where some other projects are in course. For the success of this project, I create an universal framework capable of implement any kind of radio system in real time. Thanks to this platform, the blocks for the FBMC were implemented following this framework and all the job might be reconfigurable in few days. This framework is called Universal Physical Layer and it can implement any radio communication system.

After this project was over, in 2011 I joined to an industrial project lead by Ubiquisys Ltd (now Cisco). It aimed to implement in real devices a LTE receiver for System Information reception. I developed jointly with other colleagues a full LTE Release 9 physical layer model, with transmitter and receiver for conveying the System Information block. Thus, it implements all the physical and transport channels. This implementation is done in C++ and also some MEX functions for MATLAB, able to decode LTE frames. In this project, some techniques were discovered for equalization of MIMO channels, soft bit combination and soft decoding. Thus, I get a deep knowledge in the LTE standard (36.xxx series).

In 2012 I started to work with European Space Agency projects. Particularly, we developed a MIMO system using the polarization dimension in the feeder link and deploying the ETSI TS 102 744 standard. This standard, from the transmitter and receiver sides, is devoted to support multimedia communications, with low latency (few ms) and full-duplex, with a narrowband bandwidth of 200 kHz.

Some months later, I began to develop a Li-Fi system using Visible Light Communications, by implementing the major part of IEEE 802.15.7 standard. We used a commercial LED and a photodetector. It became the first world implementation of this technology and we were able to convey a video in real time.

In 2014, I started a personal ambitious project: CASTLE (Cloud Architecture for STandards deveLopmEnt). CASTLE is a platform where researchers, students and industry can test and experiment with some standards such as LTE, ETSI 102 744 or IEEE 802.15.7. It contains a cloud computing architecture joined with 4 USRP X300 that support 200 Msps with two full-duplex channels (4×4 MIMO full duplex in total). The key idea of CASTLE is that people can experiment and perform researches without the need to know in deep the whole protocol stack.

In 2015 I joined the FANTASTIC-5G H2020 European project by designing new algorithms to support joint transmission of broadcast and multicast streaming content without requiring additional bandwidth and promoting their implementation in real devices. In contrast to current releases of LTE, where only a single stream can be conveyed at a time, with our approach several streaming contents can be multiplexed by sharing the same frequency-time resources. In other words, several streams can be conveyed simultaneously without additional bandwidth.

In parallel, I also studied the impact of adaptive modulations and coding schemes jointly with MIMO precoding techniques in satellite multimedia communications, thanks to the ESA project SatNEx IV. In this context, we were able to emulate a boat trip in a maritime scenario introducing delayed feedback, MIMO polarization techniques and adaptive and coding schemes to increase the throughput by a factor of 50% without requiring additional power budget.