Prof. Jeffrey G. Andrews and Dr. Illsoo Sohn, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Wireless Networking and Communications Group at The University of Texas at Austin, will jointly receive the 2011 Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society for their paper. Approaching Large-System Limits Faster in Multiuser MIMO with Adaptive Channel Feedback Adjustments. This award is given once annually to an outstanding manuscript published in IEEE Communications Letters during the previous 3 calendar years which opens new lines of research, envisions bold approaches to communication, formulates new problems to solve, and essentially enlarges the field of communications engineering. This paper solves an important shortcoming of a multiuser multi-antenna transmission (also called MU-MIMO or SDMA) technique that is used in 4G cellular networks by adaptively adjusting the channel feedback mechanisms of the mobile users. The approach is of particular importance when the number of active users in a given cell is small, for example in a picocell or femtocell, or when just a few users are attempting large file downloads. Dr. Andrews will receive the honorarium and award from the Communication Society Awards Chair, Prof. H. Vincent Poor in June at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications in Kyoto, Japan.
