Professor Zhang Rui: Double IEEE Best Paper Awards for the second time
Prof Zhang Rui from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS has been conferred two prestigious IEEE awards: the IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award and the IEEE Heinrich Hertz Best Paper Award, in recognition of his pioneering research in the new field of UAV communications.
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It is noteworthy that this is a second time that Prof Zhang won these two prestigious awards. He had previously received the IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award and the IEEE Heinrich Hertz Best Paper Award in 2015 and 2017, respectively, both recognizing his pioneering contributions to another frontier wireless research field of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT).
The past few years have witnessed a tremendous increase in the use of UAVs (or drones) in both defence and civil applications. It is thus of paramount importance to ensure that all UAVs can operate safely and reliably, even when they are massively deployed in harsh environment. This thus calls for ultra-reliable, low-latency, and highly secure communication links between UAVs and ground base stations (BSs) for supporting their critical command and control signalling, as well as high-capacity data communication links with ground BSs/terminals to timely deliver their payload data (such as HD video/relayed message). To meet such new requirements, the conventional cellular technologies designed mainly for supporting terrestrial users with fixed BSs need to be re-examined or re-designed to cater to the new mobile UAV terminals/BSs over the air. There are many new challenges, such as 3D coverage/placement of UAVs, severe UAV-ground interference due to line-of-sight (LoS) channels, limited battery and endurance of UAVs, intermittent connectivity due to the high UAV mobility, etc.
Both IEEE Best Paper awards are representative work of Prof Zhang in resolving the above new challenges for UAV-ground communications, by tackling two practically important problems, namely, the optimal UAV trajectory design for communication rate maximization subject to limited on-board energy and the optimal multi-UAV 3D placement to maximize the communication coverage for distributed ground terminals. These problems had been difficult to solve due to the lack of existing models and efficient optimization techniques, whereas Prof Zhang proposed new and innovative approaches in the above papers to overcome such difficulties.
The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award, sponsored by Qualcomm Inc., for the best original paper in the field of Wireless Communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. The award comprises a plaque, honorarium of US$1,000 and travel grant of US$3,000. Prof Zhang’s award paper, “Energy-Efficient UAV Communication with Trajectory Optimization” was published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 16, No. 6, pp. 3747-3760, June 2017.
The IEEE Heinrich Hertz Best Paper Award is an annual award for the best original short paper in the field of Communications published in any letter journal sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society. The award comprises a plaque and honorarium of US$500. Prof Zhang’s award paper, “Placement Optimization of UAV-Mounted Mobile Base Stations” was published in IEEE Communications Letters, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp 604-607, March 2017.
To find out more: https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/
