PhD in Free-Space Optical and Radio Communications for Tropospheric Future Networks (ANCHOR)

Are you passionate about working on next-generation wireless communications? We foresee a future where lasers light up the sky and provide seamless connectivity for space and tropospheric networks, together with radio communications. In this PhD research you will study fundamental limits in free-space optical (FSO) communications, turn ideas into experiments, and help shape future networks with a focus on high-throughput and photon-efficiency. Join the European doctoral network with extensive training programs, welcome at the Information and Communication Theory Lab at TU/e, and enjoy a secondment at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Aveiro in Portugal.

Information
How can we use laser links to connect tropospheric nodes beyond the reach of optical fiber and overcoming the bandwidth limitations of radio? In this PhD, you will study the fundamentals of FSO wireless links for flexible networks on the ground, in the air and in space. The challenge is to combine the capacity of free-space optical communications with the complementary strengths of radio and fiber, creating links that are reliable, use the least amount of photons-per-bit, are adaptive to varying link conditions and approach fundamental limits. Your work will be part of ANCHOR, a European doctoral network exploring optical, THz and radio technologies for future communication networks, including 6G.

Your research will put free-space optical communications at the heart of hybrid FSO–RF–fiber links for terrestrial and airborne networks. You will move between theory, simulation and experiments: develop channel models that capture the essential impairments, explore how modulation, coding and low-level protocols can work together across these links, and design link architectures for experimental evaluation. The goal is to create ultra-high capacity links with high photon efficiency, as needed for tropospheric 6G NTN networks, future data centers in space and as a backup for the high-capacity fiber connections.

You will not be doing this alone. Through ANCHOR, you will join a research community spanning international partners from academia, research institutions and industry, with training that brings together theory and practical skills. You will be enrolled in the PhD program at TU/e, and your project includes a secondment at Instituto de Telecomunicações, Aveiro, Portugal. This is an opportunity to experience another research environment, exchange ideas with international collaborators and build your network beyond Eindhoven.

Throughout this PhD program you will be embedded in the ICT Lab of Signal Processing Systems group of the Department of Electrical Engineering at TU/e. Within the ICT Lab you will work within a dynamic team of approximately twenty researchers under the esteemed leadership of prof. Alex Alvarado and prof. Frans Willems (winner of the Shannon Award 2026). At the ICT Lab, we study information processing in a broad sense. We focus on finding fundamental limits, data processing techniques and architectures that aim at approaching these limits. Main areas of interest are free space optical communications, fiber communications, source coding, channel coding, (multi-user) information theory, security, and machine learning. You will have the opportunity to work with and in the extensive laboratory facilities of the TU/e’s Centre for Wireless Technology (CWTe) and you may use the 4.7 km FSO testbed in Eindhoven for high-throughput experiments. You will work closely with the second ANCHOR PhD at TU/e within the Quantum & Terahertz Systems (QTS) team in the Electro-Optical Communications (ECO) group.