Tang Receives Best Paper Award

Taiwen Tang, who received his Ph.D. in August 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Robert W. Heath Jr., received a best student paper award at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications conference, in San Diego, CA on September 17-20, 2006.

The award winning paper was entitled "Opportunistic Feedback in Clustered OFDM Systems" and was co-authored by Dr. Sunghyun Cho of Stanford University and Dr. Sangboh Yun (Samsung Electronics).

The paper presents a solution to the problem of implementing multiuser diversity in OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) systems through the use of a specially designed random access feedback control protocol. According to the authors, the main advantage of the proposed protocol is that it achieves multiuser diversity gain in the downlink of an OFDMA cellular system with very low feedback. OFDMA is the access scheme of choice in IEEE 802.16e and will most likely be a component of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution.