Prof. Yuanming Shi has won the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications

The Assistant Professor Yuanming Shi, from the School of Information Science and Technology (SIST) of ShanghaiTech University, has won the very prestigious IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for his paper titled “Group Sparse Beamforming for Green Cloud-RAN”, which appeared in the 2014 May issue of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

This paper is the first work published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications that comprehensively investigated the novel network architecture of Cloud Radio Access Networks (Cloud-RANs). Its significance lies in three aspects: 1) The paper presents a new system model for Cloud-RANs and identifies the importance of fronthaul links in this architecture; 2) The paper provides a novel formulation of network power minimization to design green Cloud-RANs, by taking fronthaul link power consumption into consideration; and3) The paper proposes a group sparse beamforming framework by convex relaxation, which provides a principled way to solve network optimization problems involving both discrete and continuous decision variables. 

The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award, sponsored by Qualcomm Inc., for an original journal paper in the field of Wireless Communications. The papers are judged and evaluated based on originality, utility, timeliness, and clarity of presentation jointly by the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society. 

The award will be presented to Prof. Yuanming Shi and his PhD advisors Prof. Jun Zhang and Prof. Khaled B. Letaief at the premier IEEE International Conference on Communications in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in May2016.