Communications

Wireless and optical communications.

We conduct advanced research in wireless and optical communications from the network layer down to the physical layer, including highly reliable machine-to-machine wireless networks, routing and scheduling for IoT networks, massive MIMO for 5G systems, flexible wideband RF front-end architectures, advanced error correction coding, and novel modulation and transmission techniques with adaptive signal processing for coherent fiber-optic and free-space optical communications.

  • Quick Links

  • Researchers

  • Awards

    •  AWARD    MERL’s Paper on Wi-Fi Sensing Earns Top 3% Paper Recognition at ICASSP 2023, Selected as a Best Student Paper Award Finalist
      Date: June 9, 2023
      Awarded to: Cristian J. Vaca-Rubio, Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Petros Boufounos and Petar Popovski
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • A MERL Paper on Wi-Fi sensing was recognized as a Top 3% Paper among all 2709 accepted papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023). Co-authored by Cristian Vaca-Rubio and Petar Popovski from Aalborg University, Denmark, and MERL researchers Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Petros Boufounos, the paper "MmWave Wi-Fi Trajectory Estimation with Continous-Time Neural Dynamic Learning" was also a Best Student Paper Award finalist.

        Performed during Cristian’s stay at MERL first as a visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and then as a full-time intern in 2022, this work capitalizes on standards-compliant Wi-Fi signals to perform indoor localization and sensing. The paper uses a neural dynamic learning framework to address technical issues such as low sampling rate and irregular sampling intervals.

        ICASSP, a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), was hosted on the Greek island of Rhodes from June 04 to June 10, 2023. ICASSP 2023 marked the largest ICASSP in history, boasting over 4000 participants and 6128 submitted papers, out of which 2709 were accepted.
    •  
    •  AWARD    Best Paper Award of 2022 IPSJ Transactions on Consumer Devices & Systems
      Date: March 27, 2023
      Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Hiroshi Mineno
      MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons
      Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MELCO/MERL research paper “IEEE 802.19.3 Standardization for Coexistence of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g Systems in Sub-1GHz Frequency Bands” has won the Best Paper Award of the 2022 IPSJ Transactions on Consumer Devices and Systems. The Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) award was established in 1970 and is conferred on the authors of particularly excellent papers, which are published in the IPSJ journals and transactions. Our paper was published by the IPSJ Transaction on Consumer Device and System Vol. 29 in 2021 and authors are Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik and Hiroshi Mineno.
    •  
    •  AWARD    MERL receives 33rd ARIB Radio Achievement Award
      Date: June 28, 2022
      Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Jianlin Guo, Shoichi Kitazawa, Kazuto Yano.
      MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik
      Research Areas: Communications, Electric Systems
      Brief
      • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Yukimasa Nagai), MERL (Jianlin Guo), Muroran Institute of Technology (Shoichi Kitazawa) and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (Kazuto Yano) jointly won the 33rd ARIB Radio Achievement Award with "IEEE 802.19.3 Standardization and Development for Sub-1 GHz Wireless Frequency Coexistence". The ARIB is an organization similar to the FCC in the U.S. It is responsible for setting standards for all radio communications in Japan at the request of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). In order to promote the effective use of radio waves, the "Radio Achievement Award" is given annually to an individual or organization that has made a special achievement in the effective use of radio waves. This award is the most prestigious award in the field of wireless communications in Japan.
    •  

    See All Awards for Communications

  • News & Events

    •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025
      Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
      Location: Hyderabad, India
      MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; François Germain; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.

        Sponsorship

        MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

        MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.

        Technical Program

        MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.

        MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.

        Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".

        About ICASSP

        ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
    •  
    •  NEWS    MERL Researchers to Present 2 Conference and 11 Workshop Papers at NeurIPS 2024
      Date: December 10, 2024 - December 15, 2024
      Where: Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Matthew Brand; Ankush Chakrabarty; Anoop Cherian; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Christopher R. Laughman; Jonathan Le Roux; Jing Liu; Suhas Lohit; Tim K. Marks; Yoshiki Masuyama; Kieran Parsons; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Diego Romeres; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
      Brief
      • MERL researchers will attend and present the following papers at the 2024 Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference and Workshops.

        1. "RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception" by Ryoma Yataka (Mitsubishi Electric), Adriano Cardace (Bologna University), Perry Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Petros Boufounos (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ryuhei Takahashi (Mitsubishi Electric). Main Conference. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/95530

        2. "Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads" by Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joanna Matthiesen (Math Kangaroo USA), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Josh Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Main Conference, Datasets and Benchmarks track. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/97639

        3. "Probabilistic Forecasting for Building Energy Systems: Are Time-Series Foundation Models The Answer?" by Young-Jin Park (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Navid Azizan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Christopher R. Laughman (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Time Series in the Age of Large Models Workshop.

        4. "Forget to Flourish: Leveraging Model-Unlearning on Pretrained Language Models for Privacy Leakage" by Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Shagufta Mehnaz (Penn State University), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Red Teaming GenAI: What Can We Learn from Adversaries?

        5. "Spatially-Aware Losses for Enhanced Neural Acoustic Fields" by Christopher Ick (New York University), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Yoshiki Masuyama (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jonathan Le Roux (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Audio Imagination Workshop.

        6. "FV-NeRV: Neural Compression for Free Viewpoint Videos" by Sorachi Kato (Osaka University), Takuya Fujihashi (Osaka University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Takashi Watanabe (Osaka University). Machine Learning and Compression Workshop.

        7. "GPT Sonography: Hand Gesture Decoding from Forearm Ultrasound Images via VLM" by Keshav Bimbraw (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). AIM-FM: Advancements In Medical Foundation Models: Explainability, Robustness, Security, and Beyond Workshop.

        8. "Smoothed Embeddings for Robust Language Models" by Hase Ryo (Mitsubishi Electric), Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Ashley Lewis (Ohio State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kieran Parsons (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Safe Generative AI Workshop.

        9. "Slaying the HyDRA: Parameter-Efficient Hyper Networks with Low-Displacement Rank Adaptation" by Xiangyu Chen (University of Kansas), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Matthew Brand (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Pu Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Adaptive Foundation Models.

        10. "Preference-based Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Gradients" by Joshua Hang Sai Ip (University of California Berkeley), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ali Mesbah (University of California Berkeley), Diego Romeres (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty. Lightning talk spotlight.

        11. "TR-BEACON: Shedding Light on Efficient Behavior Discovery in High-Dimensions with Trust-Region-based Bayesian Novelty Search" by Wei-Ting Tang (Ohio State University), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joel A. Paulson (Ohio State University). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty.

        12. "MEL-PETs Joint-Context Attack for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Red Team Track" by Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Special Award for Practical Attack.

        13. "MEL-PETs Defense for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Blue Team Track" by Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Won 3rd Place Award.

        MERL members also contributed to the organization of the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips24/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tim K. Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Juan Carlos Niebles (Salesforce AI Research), Petar Veličković (Google DeepMind).
    •  

    See All News & Events for Communications

  • Research Highlights

  • Recent Publications

    •  Fujihashi, T., Koike-Akino, T., Watanabe, T., "Rateless Deep Joint Source Channel Coding for 3D Point Cloud", IEEE Access, June 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-069 PDF
      • @article{Fujihashi2025jun,
      • author = {Fujihashi, Takuya and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Watanabe, Takashi},
      • title = {{Rateless Deep Joint Source Channel Coding for 3D Point Cloud}},
      • journal = {IEEE Access},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-069}
      • }
    •  Attiah, K., Wang, P., Mansour, H., Koike-Akino, T., Boufounos, P.T., "Enabling DMG Wi-Fi Sensing in Data Transmission Intervals by Exploiting Beam Training Codebook", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-026 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Attiah2025mar,
      • author = {Attiah, Kareem and Wang, Pu and Mansour, Hassan and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Boufounos, Petros T.},
      • title = {{Enabling DMG Wi-Fi Sensing in Data Transmission Intervals by Exploiting Beam Training Codebook}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = mar,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-026}
      • }
    •  Nagai, Y., Guo, J., Rolfe, B.A., Sumi, T., Parsons, K., Orlik, P.V., "IEEE 802.19.3a Standardization: Updating Sub-1 GHz Band Wireless Coexistence Recommendations", IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN), November 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-161 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Nagai2024nov,
      • author = {Nagai, Yukimasa and Guo, Jianlin and Rolfe, Benjamin A. and Sumi, Takenori and Parsons, Kieran and Orlik, Philip V.},
      • title = {{IEEE 802.19.3a Standardization: Updating Sub-1 GHz Band Wireless Coexistence Recommendations}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = nov,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-161}
      • }
    •  Sumi, T., Nagai, Y., Guo, J., Mineno, H., "Firmware Distribution with Erasure Code for IoT applications on IEEE 802.15.4g Mesh Network", Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications 2024, November 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-153 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Sumi2024nov,
      • author = {Sumi, Takenori and Nagai, Yukimasa and Guo, Jianlin and Mineno, Hiroshi},
      • title = {{Firmware Distribution with Erasure Code for IoT applications on IEEE 802.15.4g Mesh Network}},
      • booktitle = {Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications 2024},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = nov,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-153}
      • }
    •  Kojima, K., Koike-Akino, T., "Photonics × Machine Learning", FIOLS, September 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-154 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Kojima2024sep,
      • author = {Kojima, Keisuke and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Photonics × Machine Learning}},
      • booktitle = {FIOLS},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-154}
      • }
    •  Rahman, M., Yataka, R., Kato, S., Wang, P., Li, P., Cardace, A., Boufounos, P.T., "MMVR: Millimeter-wave Multi-View Radar Dataset and Benchmark for Indoor Perception", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), DOI: 10.1007/​978-3-031-72986-7_18, September 2024, pp. 306–322.
      BibTeX TR2024-117 PDF Data
      • @inproceedings{Rahman2024sep,
      • author = {Rahman, Mahbub and Yataka, Ryoma and Kato, Sorachi and Wang, Pu and Li, Peizhao and Cardace, Adriano and Boufounos, Petros T.},
      • title = {{MMVR: Millimeter-wave Multi-View Radar Dataset and Benchmark for Indoor Perception}},
      • booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {306–322},
      • month = sep,
      • publisher = {Springer},
      • doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-72986-7_18},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-117}
      • }
    •  Kirihara, H., Ibuki, S., Fujihashi, T., Koike-Akino, T., Watanabe, T., "Point Cloud Geometry Compression using Parameterized Graph Fourier Transform", ACM SIGCOMM, DOI: 10.1145/​3672196.367340, August 2024, pp. 52-57.
      BibTeX TR2024-106 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Kirihara2024aug,
      • author = {Kirihara, Hinata and Ibuki, Shoichi and Fujihashi, Takuya and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Watanabe, Takashi},
      • title = {{Point Cloud Geometry Compression using Parameterized Graph Fourier Transform}},
      • booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {52--57},
      • month = aug,
      • publisher = {ACM},
      • doi = {10.1145/3672196.367340},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-106}
      • }
    •  Nagai, Y., Guo, J., Rolfe, B.A., Yano, K., Sumi, T., Parsons, K., Orlik, P.V., Wang, P., "Sub-1 GHz Band Wireless Coexistence Study for OFDM Systems in IEEE 802.19.3a", Workshop on Smart Radio for IoT Era (SRIoT), July 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-090 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Nagai2024jul,
      • author = {Nagai, Yukimasa and Guo, Jianlin and Rolfe, Benjamin A. and Yano, Kazuto and Sumi, Takenori and Parsons, Kieran and Orlik, Philip V. and Wang, Pu},
      • title = {{Sub-1 GHz Band Wireless Coexistence Study for OFDM Systems in IEEE 802.19.3a}},
      • booktitle = {Workshop on Smart Radio for IoT Era (SRIoT)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-090}
      • }
    See All Publications for Communications

  • Videos

  • Software & Data Downloads