Rapidly increasing demands for higher mobile data rates and ubiquitous data access have led to a spectrum crunch over the traditional wireless communication frequency bands. Luckily, Tandon doctoral candidate Shu Sun explains that new spectrum allocations in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands are helping to alleviate the shortage and allowing for the development of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications. In order to test proposed 5G system designs, she cautions, solid knowledge of the propagation channel characteristics across all microwave and mmWave frequencies is needed.

In mid-2016 she and her co-authors published a paper in the IEEE’s Transactions on Vehicular Technology comparing three candidate large-scale propagation path loss models for accuracy and sensitivity, and it was quickly deemed a must-read study for everyone in the 5G research community and its standards bodies.

“Investigation of Prediction Accuracy, Sensitivity, and Parameter Stability of Large-Scale Propagation Path Loss Models for 5G Wireless Communications” — whose co-authors include Theodore S. Rappaport, Shu Sun’s doctoral adviser and the founding director of NYU WIRELESS, the research center where she conducted her work — proved the superiority of the optional “close in” one-meter reference distance path loss model recently adopted by important standards bodies in the design of future indoor and urban cellular systems. The work was undertaken with the help of industry affiliate sponsors Nokia and Qualcomm and the participation of peers at Denmark’s Aalborg University.

In July, the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) announced that the journal article had garnered its prestigious Neal Shephard Propagation Prize Paper Award, judged on the basis of uniqueness, quality, readability, and lasting impact. The award will be presented to her and her co-authors at the Society’s next conference, to be held in Toronto in September 2017.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by the VTS, and I owe much of my success to Professor Rappaport, who is one of the most eminent researchers in the field of wireless communications, as well as to my other professors, like Sundeep Rangan, I-Tai Lu, and Henry Bertoni, who have given me valuable guidance during my Ph.D. career,” she says. “It’s been wonderful to travel throughout the world presenting the work we’re doing at NYU WIRELESS, meeting peers in academia and industry, and seeing firsthand how the research being done here in Brooklyn is influencing the wireless field on a practical level.”