IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
31 August-3 September 2020 // Virtual Conference

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General Conference Chair’s Welcome

Professor Izzat Darwazeh General Co-Chair of PIMRC 2020 invites you to the conference


Dear colleagues and friends,

Hello all and Welcome to London’s PIMRC 2020; the 31st of the PIMRCs, the fourth to be hosted in London and the first to be held as in virtual form.

I am Izzat Darwazeh, a professor at University College London and director of UCL’s Institute of Communications and Connected Systems. Along with Hamid Aghvami we are the general cochairs of PIMRC 2020 and together with a wonderful organising committee, we have created what we hope will be a conference to be remembered for many years to come.

PIMRC was founded in 1989 by Hamid here in London, we are very pleased to be bringing you this year’s edition from the home of the conference.

Entering its fourth-decade PIMRC remains one of the world premiere conferences on mobile communications. In its previous 30 editions, it has been attended by well over 10,000 people and presented over 10,000 papers and presentation, many of which reported world-first results that have been setting the standards of this fascinating and fast-moving field of mobile communications.

This 31st edition will be no exception. The year 2020 has seen major technological development in the area and is the year the 5th generation of mobile systems (5G) widely being deployed across the globe with new technologies, new applications and numerous associated and exciting repercussions; technological, economic, political and societal. 2020 is also the year when serious discussions are emerging about what should come after (or beyond) 5G. Expectedly, these topics, fundamental and practical, technological and societal, are the focus of the 31st PIMRC with its 5 keynotes, 5 panels, and close to 300 technical contributions.

This year’s conference is being run under exceptional circumstances. We started planning for London’s PIMRC nearly 2 years ago. The expectation was to run this in central London at University College London (UCL) with an expected attendance close to 1000 participants and prepared for a conference that maintained PIMRCs excellent technical standards and fun social events. We had already announced that some of the conference budget would be used to offer travel grants to those who may find it challenging to fund travel and conference attendance, logistical plans were far ahead and then we had the pandemic. Following much debate, we decided to proceed with the conference in the now realised alternative format. This was not without its own challenges.

We believe we have created both an exciting programme and conference structure which was designed to stimulate discussion and participation of attendees from different corners of the world. Our panels will be live and while all papers are required to have a video presentation the conference sessions will have life in them, presenters will be there to answer questions and technical discussions will be encouraged.

We certainly encourage all participants and attendees to attend and engage with sessions as-though you were here in person. We do understand restrictions may be imposed by your time zone, however, the programme has been designed to minimize such problems.

In addition to attending keynotes, technical sessions, panels, tutorials and workshops, conferences are always good networking, to meet old friends and make new connections and friendships. the Virtual Platform we are using has many features to allow you to contact and network with other attendees. Please do engage with PIMRC 2020 as fully as you would if you were in London in person. Please download the app, look at the website and try the technology ahead of the conference.

I am an experimental communications engineer and I do hope this will be an interesting experiment. We hope that the use of the virtual conference technology will pave the way for different types of future conferences that can integrate physical and virtual giving wider opportunities to those who would find it normally difficult to attend in person.

Hamid and I would like to thank the honorary chair of the conference, Professor Tim Whitley and the TPC chair Professor Luis Correia for their hard work, dedication and initiative.

Our special thanks go to Dr Robert Thompson, the chair of the organising committee, without whom, this transition would have not been so smooth and efficient.

We conclude by reflecting that better times will come and we sincerely hope that in the not too distant future you will come and visit us in London. This is an open invitation to each and every one of you talk to us or engage with us at UCL and at KCL during the conference and in the future.

We look forward to seeing you at London’s PIMRC 2020, which I am sure that it will be not only exciting technically but also good fun.

Izzat Darwazeh & Hamid Aghvami (PIMRC 2020 General Co-Chairs)


TPC Chair’s Welcome

Professor Luis M. Correia Chair of the Technical Programme Committee welcomes attendees to PIMRC 2020


Dear Colleague,

Welcome to the 2020 edition of PIMRC – IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

It’s not every day that a conference celebrates its 31st anniversary, with a very successful history, and especially coming back to the place where it started in 1989, i.e., London, UK. Unfortunately, for all of us, given the current pandemic, we can’t celebrate this anniversary physically with our British colleagues, rather having to connect and interact via the communication means we help developing since the very first edition of the conference, namely video-conference via mobile and wireless communications.

As you know, the acceptance of papers in a conference is limited by both absolute and relative thresholds. While the former means that papers that are below the technical borderline cannot be accepted, the latter implies that some papers that are above this borderline cannot be accepted either, because the conference does not have capacity for them. This was definitely the case for this year’s edition of PIMRC, where good quality papers could not be accepted, following IEEE ComSoc’s guideline that a maximum of 50% can be accepted. We had a total of 522 submitted papers, from which exactly 50% were accepted, i.e., 261. All papers had, at least, 3 reviews, but the average was 3.9, which means that a good number of papers had more than 3 reviews; this gives us a comfortable view of the quality of the conference and of the accepted papers. This was possible only due to the dedication of all the colleagues involved in the review process, in a total of 694, who have contributed to the high quality of the conference and to whom we’re very grateful. Regarding workshops and tutorials, we had a high number of proposals, i.e., 14 and 22, of which 8 and 13 were accepted (roughly, slightly above 50%), respectively; again, we couldn’t accept all good proposals, due to the lack of capacity. As far as panels are concerned, we took a mixed perspective, i.e., taking proposals that have been submitted and also fostering the organisation of some.

Given the virtual mode of the conference, the programme has suffered some changes from the usual one. Still, we keep having the usual sessions, ranging from the Keynote talks to the technical sessions with the oral presentation of the papers, encompassing panels, and having in addition workshops and tutorials. Content wise, the programme is quite interesting, discussing not only 5G implementation matters but also 6G perspectives, with many other matters around them.

We would like to thank all of those who have contributed to the success of the conference: the authors of the submitted papers, and of the proposals for panels, tutorials and workshops; the invited keynote speakers, panels’ moderators and members, and sessions’ chairpersons, who accepted the invitation to be participate, hence, providing an excellent added value to the conference; the members of the Technical Programme Committee, who provided the necessary expertise and performed an excellent work in evaluating the papers; the Track Chairs and Co-Chairs, who did all the hard work in managing the tracks, and to whom we’re in debt for all the time and effort they have dedicated to this conference; last, but not the least, all the other people involved in the organisation of the conference.

We hope that you enjoy the conference, and that you’ve a chance in the future to enjoy the city. Thank you for attending PIMRC, and we do hope that we can all meet in next year’s edition in a physical location to celebrate this conference.

Luis M. Correia Professor, IST/INESC-ID/INOV – Uni. Lisbon, Portugal (Technical Programme Committee Chair)

Slawomir J. Ambroziak Professor, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics – Gdańsk Uni. Tech., Poland (Technical Programme Committee Vice-Chair)


Steering Committee Chair’s Welcome

Professor Hamid Aghvami, Chair of the Conference Steering Committee and General Co-Chair of PIMRC’20 welcomes you to this year’s conference.

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