SUSTAIN-6G Research Receives Best Poster Award at SITB 2026

SUSTAIN-6G is pleased to share that Jona Cappelle from KU Leuven recently participated in the 46th Symposium on Information Theory and Signal Processing (SITB 2026), held in Ghent on 19-20 May 2026, where his poster presentation received one of the Best Poster Awards.

The awarded work, titled “Drone Area Network for Remote IoT Devices”, highlights innovative research aligned with SUSTAIN-6G’s mission to advance sustainable and efficient future communication systems.

“The presented research explores how UAVs can act as mobile data collectors for IoT sensor networks. By periodically flying over deployment areas, drones can retrieve buffered sensor data and enable energy-efficient firmware updates. The key idea is to leverage short-range, high-throughput communication between UAVs and IoT nodes, allowing a transition from low data rate LPWAN links to higher throughput modulation schemes such as GFSK. The focus is on sustainability by reusing and reconfiguring existing LoRa hardware. With this hardware reuse approach, the link reaches data rates above 100 kbps in the 868 MHz ISM band while significantly improving energy efficiency per transmitted byte.”

SITB 2026 brought together researchers and experts working across information theory, signal processing, wireless communications, IoT, AI, and emerging technologies, offering a valuable forum for exchanging ideas and showcasing cutting-edge research.

More information about the conference is available at: https://sitb2026.dramco.be/