Date: May 29, 2019

Prof. Meixia Tao, her PhD student Erkai Chen and her former UG student Hao Zhou, all from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and her collaborator Prof. Wei Yu, from University of Toronto, recently received the 2019 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for their paper entitled "Content-Centric Sparse Multicast Beamforming for Cache-Enabled Cloud RAN”.

The IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award is an annual award for an original paper in the field of wireless communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, a most widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal in telecommunications. Only one original paper receives this top honor each year for its originality, utility, timeliness, and clarity of presentation. The award was presented in the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) held at Shanghai in May 2019.

This paper introduces a content-centric transmission design in a cloud radio-access networks (C-RAN) by leveraging multicasting and caching capabilities. Namely, users requesting the same content form a multicast group, and base stations caching the same content form a cooperation cluster for transmit beamforming. The content-centric design can dramatically reduce the total transmit power consumption and backhaul requirement than the traditional designs. The full paper can be accessed at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7488289