Swindlehurst Wins IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper
Jan. 13, 2022 – Lee Swindlehurst, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, won a 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society’ Best Paper Award.
His article "Channel Estimation and Performance Analysis of One-Bit Massive MIMO Systems," published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing’s Aug. 1, 2017, issue, was one of five to receive a best paper award.
Swindlehurst’s research explores multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems for information transmission. He explained that using large arrays of many antennas in modern wireless communications systems helps users achieve dramatic increases in the amount of data that can be wirelessly transmitted back and forth, such as between a base station or access point and a computer or cell phone. While this approach is common and large gains are theoretically achievable with such antenna arrays, they are very costly to manufacture and operate if traditional methods are used to construct them.
“This paper examines the possibility of using a simplified array architecture employing very simple data converters that quantize each sample down to only a single bit – plus or minus – rather than retaining the actual value of the data itself,” Swindlehurst said. “Such data converters are very inexpensive to manufacture, consume very little electrical energy and simplify the entire chain of hardware required to convert wireless signals into data.
“While the simple data converters do lead to a loss of signal fidelity, this paper shows how to best manage the loss, and illustrates what level of performance is achievable compared to more traditional power-hungry systems. The result is important for those who design next-generation wireless systems and provides them with tools to better understand the trade-off between energy efficiency and communications efficiency.”
Collaborators include Yongzhi Li, Cheng Tao and Liu Liu, Beijing Jiaotong University; Gonzalo Seco-Granados, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; and Amine Mezghani, who was a postdoctoral scholar with Swindlehurst at UCI and is now at University of Manitoba. Li and Seco-Granados were visiting Swindlehurst's research group when the work was formulated.
The awards ceremony will be held at the 2022 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in May in Singapore.
– Tonya Becerra
