Samuele Zanini has won the GTTI PhD Award 2026

Another academic achievement for a student of the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca: Samuele Zanini received the GTTI PhD Award 2026, a national prize conferred annually by the Telecommunications and Information Technology Group (GTTI) on the best doctoral theses in the field of communications technology, particularly in the areas of digital communications and telecommunications networks.

Zanini, a former student on the National Doctoral Programme in Cybersecurity coordinated by the IMT School and a researcher at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, received the award for his thesis entitled “Resilience of 5G Positioning: Optimisation Framework, Physical Layer Security, and Experimental Validation”, in which he addressed the topic of 5G positioning from various perspectives, combining the optimisation of system performance with a study of its security and experimental validation on a real 5G platform.

According to Zanini’s research, positioning based on 5G radio signals, which enables the location of a device to be estimated, is particularly important in all contexts where GPS is unavailable. For applications such as autonomous driving or Industry 4.0, however, it is not just the accuracy of the estimate that matters: the time taken to calculate it – that is, latency – and, above all, the reliability of the result are also important. Hence the question underlying the research: how much can we trust the position returned by the system?

Through experimental validation on a real-world 5G platform, Zanini’s research focused in particular on the impact of an attack on the positioning system and on the design of effective countermeasures capable of detecting it. The aim is to make 5G positioning systems not only accurate, but also more secure and reliable.