Engineering Professors and Graduate Students Win IEEE Best Paper Awards

Associate Professor Syed Jafar (center) and graduate student Arash Gholamidavoodi (right) accept a Best Paper Award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 Engineering professor Syed Jafar and his graduate student Arash Gholamidavoodi earned a Best Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) GLOBECOM 2014, held last month in Austin, Texas. Their research proved a long-standing assumption regarding the benefits of multiple antennas as it relates to transmitting high data rates expected from fifth generation (5G) wireless networks.

“Engineering intuition dictates that if the channel coefficients at the transmitter are limited to a finite precision number then the various benefits of multiple antennas at the transmitter are lost. All prior attempts at proving this conjecture had failed,” explains Jafar. “By incorporating novel combinatorial reasoning along with more classical information and theoretic arguments, we’ve shown that this pessimistic engineering intuition is in fact provably correct.”

Of the 2,171 papers submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM, only 14 were selected as best papers.

A paper written by Chancellor’s Professor Hamid Jafarkhani and graduate student Sina Poorkasmaei was also recognized at this conference as among the top 50 “Best of Globecom14.” Their research addressed how to manage the timing of multiple users in a wireless communications system. “We’ve designed an asynchronous modulation scheme that shows promise as opposed to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that the signals of all users should be synchronized at the receiver,” explains Jafarkhani.