Our Communications and Signal Processing Group is celebrating three awards for outstanding research papers that advance communications technology.

Beyond 5G

Professor Bruno Clerckx and team have won the 2022 EURASIP Best Paper Award for their paper "Rate-splitting Multiple Access for Downlink Communication Systems: Bridging, Generalizing, and Outperforming SDMA and NOMA” published in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking.

The award is presented by the European Association for Signal Processing for the best original paper published in the journal in the previous four calendar years.

Co-authors of the paper are Dr Yijie Mao who was a PhD student at Hong Kong University (HKU) and a visiting student at Imperial at the time of the research, and Professor Victor O K Li from HKU.

With the next generation 6G, it is expected that connectivity requirements will increase dramatically due to the number of different devices and services simultaneously operating across our wireless networks, from smartphones to IoT systems.

This research paper investigates a novel alternative to improve the quality of service in transmission through a powerful algorithm, called Rate-splitting Multiple Access, which makes a more efficient use of the available resources (in the time, frequency, spatial, and power domains) to simultaneously serve multiple services and devices compared to existing techniques used in 5G.

The research has drawn significant attention in the IEEE Communications Society and has led to a new special interest group on the topic.

Deep Learning

A research team led by Professor Geoffrey Li has won the 2022 IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award for their paper “Deep Learning in Physical Layer Communications.”

The annual prize is awarded for best original paper published in any IEEE Communications Society magazine in the previous three calendar years.

The paper’s authors include Dr Zhijin Qin (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Hao Ye (Qualcomm Inc and a former PhD student of Professor Li’s), and Professor Fred Juang (Georgia Institute of Technology).

Their prize paper provides an overview on the recent advancements in deep learning (DL)-based physical layer communications, which have shown a great potential to revolutionise communication systems. A deep neural network (DNN) is used to find data representation at each layer. In recent years, DL has shown its overwhelming benefit to many areas, such as computer vision, robotics, and natural language processing, due to its advanced algorithms and tools in learning complicated models.

In the paper, the team categorised the applications of DL in physical layer communications into systems with and without block structures. For DL-based communication systems with the block structure, the power of DL in signal compression and signal detection was demonstrated. For those without block structures, the paper introduced end-to-end transceiver design enabled by DL. The paper provided the pathway to the next generation of wireless communications exploiting artificial intelligence.

Towards future technologies

Professor Kin K Leung’s team has won the 2022 IEEE Communications Society Best Survey Paper Award for their paper “A Survey of Indoor Localization Systems and Technologies.”

The IEEE Best Survey Paper Award honours the author/s of an especially meritorious paper published in any ComSoc journal in the past five years, on a subject related to the Society’s technical scope.

The award-winning paper was co-authored by Dr Faheem Zafari ( a former PhD student of Professor Leung), and Dr Athanasios Gkelias (a Research Fellow on Professor Leung’s team).

The paper provides an extensive analysis and comparison of numerous indoor localisation techniques, technology enablers and systems. Emphasis has been given to Internet-of-Things (IoT) and new communication technologies, which have resulted in new applications and services requiring seamless and ubiquitous localisation or navigation of both static and mobile devices.

The team introduces an evaluation framework, where comprehensive metrics are used to assess the performance, cost and technology readiness of an extensive list of the most important indoor localisation systems available to date. A thorough review and elaborated comparison of these systems is provided, and their main attributes, advantages and disadvantages are summarised. Finally, the paper discusses the technical challenges that indoor localisation currently faces, suggests potential solutions, poses open questions, and points towards future research directions.

Our congratulations to all on this trio of awards. Great news in the week that we are also celebrating Imperial’s recognition as a world-class research university in the recent REF results. The College ranks top in the UK overall – with a greater proportion of 4* “world-leading” research than any other UK university.