I+ART: Industry-Academia Research Track

Event Date: 8^th January, 2026

Event Timings: 10:00 am to 5:30 pm

We live in exciting times, witnessing an extremely rapid pace of growth of demanding applications such as networked robotics, industrial wireless networking, connected and intelligent devices, AR/VR/XR-based games and applications. Increasingly, it is the industry that is first confronted with the need to deliver the advances required in current technology, and the requirements for next generation technology. On the other hand, academia, with their years of study, teaching, and research are superbly positioned to explore and enable fundamental and generalized solutions to these problems, and thereby also drive their own research agendas. Successful R&D ecosystems around world have understood the importance of the academia-industry interface. It is with this in mind that I+ART will bring together top industry experts and researchers from academia to share their understanding of upcoming open problems and research driven solutions.

High speed wireless networks rely fundamentally on efficient and reliable wireless PHY layer mechanisms, which have evolved today to be able to support 10s of gigabits per second in both cellular and Wi-Fi systems. On the other hand, support of demanding applications, such as AR/XR, edge-controlled robot swarms, etc., will require efficient application-aware networking, that should adopt more and more techniques from reinforcement learning and AI/ML.

I+ART in COMSNETS 2026 will, thus, have two themes:

The evolution and roadmap for wireless PHY/MAC techniques, and
Application-aware wireless networking

This will be a full day track, comprising an academia-industry keynote, and 4 invited talks, two from academia and two from the industry, each with plenty of time for discussion. The talks will provide cutting edge technical material, and intense discussion. There will be two panel discussions, one on each of the two themes. The aim will be for each panel to create a complete “story”, rather than random thoughts; the moderators will engage with the panelists, well before the discussions, to make the above happen.