MET Specialisations

Specialisation in Antennas, Microwaves and Photonics for Communications and Earth Observation

Why learning about Antennas, Microwaves and Photonics for Communications and Earth Observation?

Modern communication and satellite navigation systems, as well as remote sensors for Earth Observation or for automatic road driving, and many other technologies, rely on the propagation of electromagnetic waves and their interaction with matter (e.g. the land or ocean surface, atmospheric constituents, or man-made targets).

Increased transmission rates, spatial resolution, or the particular properties of the materials with respect to frequency have fostered the use of microwave, terahertz and optical spectral domains.

Individuals willing to master these systems and their applications must be able to understand the underlying physical principles and to develop technologies and techniques for transmitting, collecting, and processing signals in these frequency ranges, and exploit all their potential, including antennas, transceivers, data acquisition and storage systems, real-time FPGA or GPU-based processors...

The MET Specialization on Antennas, Microwaves and Photonics for Communications and Earth Observation provides the required theoretical background and hands-on training to start an industrial or academic career in a wide variety of fields, such as:

  • Microwave and optical wireless communication systems (5G, Internet of Things, Li-Fi, …).

  • Automotive and aircraft electronics (collision-avoidance radars and lidars, communications systems…).

  • Microwave and terahertz medical imaging, optical diagnosis and security.

  • Microwave, terahertz, and optical payloads for communications and Earth observation satellites and aircrafts

  • Small satellites and drones for remote sensing.

  • Environmental and geophysical remote sensing through active and passive microwave and optical systems for land and atmosphere observation.

For more information check the following link:

 

Specialisation in Electronics

Why learning about Electronics?

  • Electronics is obviously one of the key technologies of the present and the future.
  • The acquired knowledge in the specilization can be applied to many different fields: Electronics for Communications, Embedded Digital Systems, Integrated Circuits, Micro and Nanotechnologies, Sensors and Instrumentation, etc.

  • Both industrial and research activities will need to be fed with excellent engineers. This is demonstrated by the employability of electronic engineers that is higher than 95 %.
  • The teaching activities in master level electronics at ETSETB have more than 25 years of experience and they are backed by multiple research groups at the highest quality level.

Specialisation in Optical Networks and Optical Fiber Communications

Why learning about Optical Networks and Optical Fiber Communications?

1) Essentially all metro, regional, long haul, submarine networks and data center interconnections today are fiber-based technology. At present, no other technology that exceeds the benefits offered by optical fibers is foreseen in the near future.

2) Nowadays, the global demand for fiber optic cable has never been higher. The Fiber Optic Cable Market is expected to register a CAGR of over 12.26%, during the forecast period of 2018-2023.

3) Areas targeted for 5G coverage require lots of fiber to be successful. It’s rather ironic that the projected performance goals of 5G wireless will depend on the availability of wireline fiber.

4) A lot of new applications of Optical Networks are exploding: 5G networks, Data Centers-Cloud Computing, Network Functions Virtualization, Internet-of-Things, Sensors, Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence, Medical and Bio-Engineering, etc.

5) 3 Top Level Research Centers in Calatonia:

6) Photonics, optical fibers and nano-chips as one of the five EU-“Key-Enabling Technologies” for sustainable European Industry and 7 recent Nobel Prizes related.

7) 10.000s jobs worldwide asking for Eng. and Researchers in this field (check Google search).

Specialisation in Networks and Internet Technologies

Why choosing the Network Engineering track of MET?

Networks are an everyday commodity offering connectivity among both people and electronic devices.

Traditionally, research efforts have been focused on problems related to performance in lower layers (lack of bandwidth, latency reduction, etc.). Right now, the trend is changing since almost all devices are intelligent (contain CPU, memory, storage, etc.), and in such a scenario new challenges appear.

Future challenges are going to be about how to deal with this intelligence distributed all over a network that is, no doubt, going to be programmable. All these challenges are going to be addressed at the network and higher layers.

So, why choosing Network Engineering track?

  • You are interested in understanding and improving new and existing networking scenarios, for instance the cloud, IoT ecosystems, or vehicular networks.
  • You want to design/develop/deploy new services, lets say  for a new society (e-health or e-government).
  • You want to explore the possibilities of new tendencies in networks, including green computing, localization, network economy, or blockchain technologies.
  • You want to protect all these networks/services from security/privacy attacks.

More information about the teaching and research activities of the lecturers involved in the Network engineering, specialty of the MET master, is available at the following web pages:

Specialisation in Multimedia

Why choosing the specialisation in Multimedia?

Recently, multimedia technology is evolving at an incredible speed enabling multitude of products and applications from self-driving cars to personal assistants (e.g. Siri, Google, Alexa) and including others like real-time speech-to-speech machine translation (e.g. Skype Translator) or augmented reality (e.g. video games).

The core technology behind these applications is based on machine learning, and more precisely in deep learning, which are powerful algorithms that learn from real examples. Far beyond multimedia, the use of these algorithms is extendable and generalizable to almost any field you can imagine (e.g. business/sports/music analytics).

In this Multimedia specialisation you will be:

  • Learning theory and applications of vision, speech and text with latest technologies.

  • Understanding current deep learning architectures which will enable you to get the general vision of multimedia state-of-the-art and managing the standard tools of the field.  

  • Learning to design, train and develop new deep learning architectures that will enable you to propose and create new solutions in the field. 

More information about the teaching and research activities of the lecturers involved in this Multimedia specialisation is available at the following web pages:

Specialisation in Wireless Comunications

Why learning about Wireless Communications?

Wireless communications have played a key role in the last three decades as the main driver of innovation and economic growth. Mobile/Wireless Communications is the largest technology platform in human history. At the end of 2017 the number subscriptions are over 7000 million, and the mobile ecosystem supported a total of 29 million jobs (directly and indirectly).

In 2019, LTE system (4G) will become the leading mobile network technology worldwide by number of connections (more than 3000 million) and by 2025, two thirds of mobile connections across the world will operate on high-speed networks, with 4G accounting for 53% and 5G at 14%,of total mobile connections, and the number of Internet of Things (IoT) connections (including both cellular and non-cellular) will increase more than threefold worldwide between 2017 and 2025, reaching 25 billion at 2025.

On the other hand, Wireless Communications technologies are changing very fast and the new 5G and IoT technologies will open up new opportunities to tap diverse enterprise demands in sectors from manufacturing to health or power generation for instance.

In this context, learning about the methodologies and techniques necessary to manage, planning, design and implement mobile and wireless communication systems, especially for 4G systems and the new paradigms 5G and IoT, becomes a good strategy to get involved in a very dynamic sector that presents great technological challenges.

More information about the teaching and research activities of the lecturers involved in the Wireless Communication specialty of the MET master is available at the following web pages: