Graduate Student Receives 2019 Marconi Best Paper Award

Howard Zhou, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student, is the co-recipient of the 2019 Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society.

The award is for the paper, "Content-Centric Sparse Multicast Beamforming for
Cache-Enabled Cloud RAN," published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. The paper examines a content-centric design for wireless data transmission with access 
to a cloud RAN. Caching popular content at different base stations using multicast transmission reduces repeated transmissions of those files, in turn reducing the load on the network. The study proposes an algorithm for optimizing the tradeoff between power consumption due to wireless transmissions and network load.

The Marconi Best Paper Award is sponsored by Qualcomm Inc. and is awarded annually for an original paper in the field of wireless communications published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Winners receive a plaque, a $1,000 honorarium, and travel reimbursement to attend the awards luncheon.