
Thomas O Olwal
Professor of Wireless Communication Engineering
Abstract
In today’s digital era, wireless mobile technology has emerged as a foundational platform driving the digital transformation across diverse domains. Moving towards the future beyond 2030, the advent of 6G and beyond holds immense potential to revolutionise connectivity on a global scale. This talk will cover next generation wireless trends, which includes network growth drivers and challenges, segmentation and industry beyond 2030. The trends present the advancement in communication technologies beyond current 5G key features, benefits, applications, challenges and opportunities aimed at improving speed, capacity, coverage, reliability, latency and flexibility. These technologies cover also aspect of 6G and beyond including new techniques for radio, MIMO, radio access, AI, network slicing, and future satellite communications. It is envisaged that these technology trends will drive digital innovations for sustainable and inclusive economic development.
Biography
Thomas Olwal received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa in 2011 and PhD in Computer Science from Université Paris-Est, France in 2011. Afterwards, he worked as a Senior Researcher in Wireless Computing and Networking Research Group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research later as an Associate Professor and Full Professor of Telecommunication Engineering and the Head of Electrical Engineering Department at the Tshwane University of Technology. He is a registered Professional Engineer with Engineering Council of South Africa, a Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Senior Member of South African Institute of Electrical Engineers. He has served in high quality IEEE Transaction Journals, Elsevier Science Direct Journals and other Web of Science and Scopus -indexed Journals as an Advisory and Reviewer. He has also been serving as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member and Chair for several IEEE organised Conferences internationally. He is a National Research Foundation (NRF) rated Established researcher. His current research interest is centred on new developments of spectrum and energy efficient radio resource optimisation for next generation wireless networks and enabling technologies such as multimodal sensing and Internet of Things/everything. He applies tools and techniques such as ML/AI distributed algorithms, computational agent-based modelling, cognitive radio networks, software defined networks, decentralized decision making, autonomous systems, cooperation, optimization, behavioural ecology, and biomimicry to solve real-world challenges such as Sustainable Agriculture, Water, Energy, Cities, Climate and Healthcare ICT Infrastructure.
Latest publications
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