On August 20, the results of the 2025 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award were announced. Professor Zhang Haiyang from the School of Communication and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NJUPT), together with his collaborators, received this prestigious honor.
The award-winning paper, titled “Beam Focusing for Near-Field Multiuser MIMO Communications”, was co-authored by Professor Zhang Haiyang (first author), Professor Nir Shlezinger (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel), Professor Francesco Guidi (National Research Council of Italy), Professor Davide Dardari (University of Bologna, Italy), Professor Mohammadreza F. Iman (Arizona State University, USA), and Academician Yonina C. Eldar (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). The paper makes a pioneering contribution by introducing near-field beam focusing technology, opening a new direction for beam control in both the angular and distance domains, thereby overcoming the limitation of conventional far-field beamforming, which can only regulate signals in the angular domain. This breakthrough provides important theoretical support for tackling multi-user interference in 6G networks, improving spectrum efficiency and network access capacity. It has attracted wide attention and sustained follow-up from both academia and industry worldwide. To date, the paper has been cited 405 times on Google Scholar, and has been recognized as both an ESI Hot Paper (top 0.1% globally within its field) and an ESI Highly Cited Paper (top 1%).
Established in 2003 by the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award is named in honor of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Nobel laureate in physics and pioneer of transoceanic wireless communication. It is regarded as one of the most prestigious academic awards in the field of communications. Each year, the IEEE Communications Society selects only one outstanding paper from all articles published in the past three years in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, based on originality, practicality, timeliness, and clarity of presentation.
For more info, please click on the following weblink to the official award announcement:
https://www.comsoc.org/about/awards/paper-awards/ieee-marconi-prize-paper-award-wireless-communications
For more info, please click on the following weblink to the above-mentioned research paper:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9738442
(Author: Zhang Haiyang; Initial Review: Guo Yongan, Xu Lei, Dai Xiubin; Editor: Wang Hongcun; Review: Zhang Feng)
