This award recognizes a journal article that has had substantial impact over several years on a subject related to the Society’s technical scope. Li will be presented with this award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), to be held April 15-20 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The title of the award-winning paper is “An Overview of Massive MIMO: Benefits and Challenges,” published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, volume 8, number 5 in October 2014. Massive MIMO wireless communications have attracted much attention for their potential to tremendously improve spectral and energy efficiency of networks using relatively simple processing. Techniques related to massive MIMO have been extensively investigated. As one of the first comprehensive surveys on massive MIMO, this overview article has served as an excellent reference and a starting point for readers interested in massive MIMO topics in the past several years. 

Li is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and has been on the faculty since 2000. His coauthors are Lu Lu, a Ph.D. graduate of Li’s research group–the Information Transmission and Processing Laboratory–and who now works with Intel in Portland, Oregon; A. Lee Swindlehurst, a professor in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine; Alexei Ashikhmin, distinguished member of the technical staff of Bell Labs in New Jersey; and Rui Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of ECE at the National University of Singapore.