Events

Date: 29 May 2026   Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Graduate Centre: GC205

Speaker: Professor Qurrat-Ul-Ain Nadeem (New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi)

Abstract: The rapid emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is enabling transformative applications ranging from aerial surveillance and precision agriculture to emergency response and urban logistics. Supporting these applications at scale, however, requires reliable and ubiquitous wireless connectivity for aerial users operating alongside conventional terrestrial users. Existing cellular networks were originally designed for ground users using down-tilted base station antennas, making aerial connectivity highly challenging due to weak sidelobe coverage and severe inter-cell interference.
This talk explores emerging cellular architectures and analytical frameworks for enabling the coexistence of terrestrial and aerial users in 6G and beyond. The limitations of utilizing existing terrestrial cellular infrastructure for aerial coverage are first discussed, highlighting important tradeoffs between deployment cost, aerial coverage reliability, and terrestrial user performance. The talk then presents a novel architecture based on the collocation of uptilted antenna arrays on selected terrestrial base stations to provide dedicated aerial coverage while maintaining compatibility with existing networks. Using tools from stochastic geometry and incorporating realistic air-to-ground propagation, antenna radiation patterns and ground-reflected interference, the talk develops analytical frameworks for evaluating aerial coverage under different deployment strategies. The talk concludes with key design insights for future 6G networks supporting integrated terrestrial and aerial connectivity.

Bio: Qurrat-Ul-Ain Nadeem is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, and an Associated Faculty with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. From 2019 to 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia in 2015 and 2018 respectively. Her research interests lie in the areas of communication theory, signal processing, and electromagnetics and antenna theory.
She received the Paul Baron Young Scholar Award by The Marconi Society in 2018 for her work on full-dimension massive MIMO systems, and the Canada Postdoctoral Research Award by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in 2021. She has been recognized among the top 10 Rising Stars in Computer Networking and Communications by N2Women in 2024. She also received the IEEE Communications Society's Distinguished Service/Research in Developing Areas Award for the Europe, Middle-East, Africa (EMEA) region and the Exemplary Editor Award for IEEE Communications Letters in 2025. She serves as an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and has served as an Editor of IEEE Communications Letters and as the Lead Guest Editor of the SI on Multi-Function Reconfigurable Intelligent and Holographic Surfaces for 6G Networks in IEEE Network Magazine in the past. She also serves as a co-chair of several tracks and workshops at flagship conferences of IEEE Communications Society.