Meet The ESR: Rizqi Hersyandika

Published on:  Sep 30, 2022

This week’s guest is Rizqi, ESR number 8. Let’s get to know him and hear about what he has to say.

What do you do for fun?

Traveling, drone photography and playing table tennis.

Tell us a bit about your home country!

The first thing about Indonesia that probably comes to your mind is BALI. For some people, it even sounds more popular than our capital city. Although Bali might be the most popular island for the tourist destination, there are actually 17k islands in Indonesia (6k of them are inhabited), making us the largest archipelago globally. We are the 4th largest populated country with over 275M citizens. Lastly, Indonesian speak Bahasa Indonesia as the national language and have more than 700 traditional languages and dialects.

Tell us about your research

My research topic is ultra-dense cell-free mmWave deployment. The main goal of this work is to study the feasibility of cell-free architecture implementation in the mmWave band. The cell-free concept has been extensively studied for the sub-6 GHz band, and it has been proven to improve spectral efficiency. However, the study on cell-free implementation in the mmWave band is still very limited. By taking advantage of directional communication in mmWave, we can increase the spatial diversity at user terminals, allowing them to be served by multiple cooperative serving base stations. Besides improving the spectral efficiency, cell-free implementation in mmWave potentially improves the robustness against blockage thanks to multi-connectivity at the user.   

Why did you choose MINTS?

MINTS offers various research topics in mmWave, which is a hot topic in academia and industry. In addition, the topic is quite related to my master thesis, which was about human blockage in mmWave. Having basic knowledge in mmWave helps me stay updated with the research trend in this field. Furthermore, MINTS allows the ESRs to collaborate with other excellent researchers from top universities and companies in Europe.

Are you part of a work group? Tell us about the group

I’m part of the Networked System WaveCORE group under the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) KU Leuven. It is an exciting group as we have approximately 20 PhD students and researchers from different continents working in different wireless fields such as mmWave, massive MIMO, UAV, IoT, spectrum sensing, etc. We have good interaction and collaboration inside and outside the research. Follow ‘Networked Systems’ Twitter for more updates about our group.

What do you think about your host country? Do you see yourself living there in the future?

In Belgium, I see an opportunity for building a telecommunication startup company since, as I understand, the government facilitates and provides support for young entrepreneurs. With the existence of research institutions in the telecommunications field producing high-quality graduates, support from the local government, and a lot of business opportunities in this field, I think Belgium has a good ecosystem for a startup in this sector.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Becoming a professional in the telecommunication industry and contributing to the development of this sector.

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