Study with UAB involvement receive recognition from the IEEE Signal Processing Society
A paper including the involvement of Gonzalo Seco Granados, lecturer from the Department of Telecommunications and Systems Engineering, received recognition from the American IEEE Signal Processing Society as one of the top five papers published between 2015 and 2020.
The awarded paper, Channel Estimation and Performance Analysis of One-Bit Massive MIMO Systems, was published in the 1 August 2017 edition of the journal IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Gonzalo Seco Granados took part in the research during his stay as a Fulbright scholar in Professor A. Lee Swindlehurst's group at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Professor Seco Granados participated in the Fulbright programme thanks to a mobility grant from the Spanish Programme for the Promotion of Talent and Employability in R&D&i (Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación de 2013-2016).
The research focused on communication systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, known as MIMO systems, which have been able to drastically increase the speed of transmission of information from wireless communication systems thanks to the use of antenna arrays both at base stations and mobile terminals. However, the large antenna arrays, which theoretically provide an even higher increase in communication speed, come with elevated manufacturing costs and use up a lot of energy due to their multi-level analogue-to-digital converters.
In the paper, researchers analysed the possibility of using one-bit converters, thereby reducing the complexity, cost and energy consumption of the antenna arrays. Although these converters do cause a loss in signal fidelity, the study demonstrated how to process the signals and minimise this loss so that MIMO systems with a one-bit converter could become an attractive solution to traditional MIMO systems. The study proposed a model which allows a simple study of the one-bit MIMO systems despite a high degree of nonlinearity.
The results are useful for those designing future wireless communication systems, such as the 5G and 6G systems, and provide tools to help better comprehend the commitment between energy efficiency and communication efficiency.
The research also include the collaboration of Yongzhi Li, Cheng Tao and Liu Liu from the Beijing Jiaotong University, and Amine Mezghani, postdoctoral researcher at the UCI currently working at the University of Manitoba.
The researchers were given recognition for their paper at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Aucoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) held in Singapore.