Zhang awarded best paper at IEEE International Conference on Communications

Dr. Xi Zhang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, received the prestigious best paper award at the 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Communications (ICC) held May 20-24 in Kansas City, Missouri. IEEE ICC is one of the most important flagship annual conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. The 2018 conference is the 54th edition and attracts more than 2,400 paper submissions from leading scientists in academia, researchers/engineers and industry leaders around the world.

Zhang and his Ph.D. student co-author, Qixuan Zhu, won the prestigious IEEE ICC 2018 Best Paper Award for their paper titled, "Collaborative Hierarchical Caching Over 5G Edge Computing Mobile Wireless Networks.” This award was given to only 15 papers selected from more than 2,400 submitted to IEEE ICC 2018. In this paper, Zhang developed new system architectures and models to store wireless multimedia traffics (e.g., video/audio streaming, mobile TV and 3D immersive media) and transmit them over fifth generation (5G) mobile wireless networks. His proposed schemes aim at maximizing multimedia-transmission throughputs while minimizing multimedia-transmission delays. This research was supported by Zhang’s National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and plays critical roles in significantly improving the quality of everyday life based on mobile wireless networks.

Zhang is an IEEE Fellow and IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for both the Communications Society and the Vehicular Technology Society. He has published more than 320 research papers, including one that was named an IEEE Transactions/Journal Best Readings Paper, two books and several book chapters. In total, he has received five prestigious Best Paper Awards at IEEE ICC 2018; IEEE GLOBECOM 2007, 2009 and 2014; and IEEE WCNC 2010. He also received the NSF CAREER Award in 2004. He is or has served as editor for many IEEE Transactions/Journals, including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and many others. Also, he has served as Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair for GLOBECOM 2011, TCP vice chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2010, TPC area chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2012 and many others.

Zhang is the director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory. He joined the electrical and computer engineering department upon receiving his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include 5G mobile wireless networks, statistical delay-bounded quality of service provisioning for multimedia wireless networks, network protocol design and modeling, statistical communications, random signal processing, information theory, and control theory and systems.