This award recognizes an outstanding paper that has been published in any IEEE Communications Society publication in the last 15 years and that has opened new lines of work, envisioned bold approaches to communication, formulated new problems to solve, and essentially enlarged the field of communications engineering.

The title of Li’s award-winning paper is “Fundamental Trade-offs on Green Wireless Networks,” which was published in the June 2011 issue of IEEE Communications Magazine (volume 49, number 6, pp. 30-37). His coauthors on the paper are Yan Chen, Shunqing Zhang, and Shugong Xu. At the time of writing the paper, all three of Geoffrey's coauthors worked at Huawei; Zhang and Xu are now with Shanghai University.

As environmental protection and energy saving have become a global demand and inevitable trend, Li’s and his colleagues’ paper, for the first time in the world, successfully established a unified framework on green communications with four fundamental trade-offs, and has already been highly recognized and accepted by the researchers and engineers in this field as an important direction to follow nowadays. The proposed fundamental trade-offs have been used in product optimization by many companies.

Li is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he leads the Information Transmission and Processing Laboratory. Li was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2005 for his contributions to signal processing and wireless communications, and within the last decade, he has received several prestigious awards from both the IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.