Best Paper Award from the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) for the work on Massive MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs

Mr. Nguyen Van Ly, a member of the Advanced Institute of Engineering and Technology (AVITECH), has received a Best Paper Award as the first author from the Signal Processing for Communications Symposium of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The ICC 2020 was planned to be held from 7 to 11 June, 2020 in Dublin, Ireland, but then switched to a virtual conference due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper presented was entitled “SVM-based Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Massive MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs”, co-authored with his advisors, Prof. Duy Nguyen from San Diego State University and Prof. Lee Swindlehurst from the University of California, Irvine.

The paper focuses on studying channel estimation and data detection for massive MIMO systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The use of one-bit ADCs has been considered as a practical and efficient solution for addressing the hardware cost and power consumption problems in massive MIMO systems since a one-bit ADC has a very simple structure and negligible power consumption. However, one-bit ADCs make the system severely non-linear and thus the channel estimation and data detection problems are much more challenging compared to those of conventional full-resolution systems. To address these challenges, the authors have proposed low complexity yet efficient methods based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) for channel estimation and data detection in one-bit massive MIMO systems. The proposed methods can be applied for wireless systems where hardware cost and power consumption are subjected to be low but the communication performance is still guaranteed. The work also opens up potential research directions on the use of machine learning for non-linear wireless communications systems.

The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) is a flagship conference of the IEEE Communication Society, dedicated to driving innovation in nearly every aspect of communications. Each year, around 3000 researchers from around the world submit proposals for paper presentations and program sessions to be held at the annual conference. Many big technology companies in the world such as Google, Qualcomm, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, Cisco, … also often participate in this annual conference. At ICC this year, there were approximately 2100 paper submissions and the acceptance rate was about 35 – 40%.

Mr. Nguyen Van Ly graduated with a bachelor degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from VNU-UET in 2014. In 2016, he finished his master study in advanced wireless communications systems at CentraleSupelec, Paris-Saclay University, France. Since August 2017, he has been a Ph.D. student in a joint doctoral program in computational science with San Diego State University and University of California, Irvine, CA, USA. His research interests include wireless communications, signal processing, and machine learning.