Professor Yongming Huang’s research team from the School of Information Science and Engineering at Southeast University has received a Best Paper Award of the2026 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2026)(Best Paper Awards | IEEE International Conference on Communications), held in Glasgow, United Kingdom.
The paper, “On the Channel Quality of XL-MIMO Systems,”seu-zheng-wang.github.io/Files/m22118-zhu paper.pdf was authored by Yuhao Zhu, a master’s student at the School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, under the supervision of Associate Professor Zheng Wang and Professor Yongming Huang. Professor Yong Zeng also contributed to the work as a co-author.
The paper proposes an effective and efficient channel quality assessment metric for near-field XL-MIMO systems, namely the Gram Matrix Diagonal Dominance Ratio Indicator (DDRI). Defined as the ratio between the smallest diagonal element of the Gram matrix and the corresponding column sum of its off-diagonal elements, DDRI provides an intuitive measure of the inter-column interference level of the channel. It can therefore guide the selection of appropriate signal processing schemes for both uplink and downlink transmission, avoiding unnecessary computational complexity as well as performance degradation. In terms of computational efficiency, the paper derives closed-form expressions for DDRI under both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions, enabling rapid channel quality assessment with constant-order complexity based on near-field system parameters. This work demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating channel quality assessment at an early stage of communication system design and provides an important reference for the design and optimization of low-complexity signal processing in future 6G near-field communication systems.
The IEEE ICC is one of the two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society, together with IEEE GLOBECOM. The ICC is one of the largest gatherings of researchers and industry professionals in the field of communications. The 2026 conference received approximately 3,500 paper submissions from various countries and regions. Following rigorous review and recommendation by specialized technical committees, 17 papers were ultimately selected for the Best Paper Award, representing about 0.48% of the total submissions.
Abstract
Low-complexity schemes have been widely applied in massive MIMO systems to alleviate the complexity burden associated with high-dimensional signal processing. However, in XL-MIMO systems, many traditional low-complexity methods become impractical due to the significant degradation of channel conditions caused by near-field effects. In this paper, we propose the diagonal dominance ratio indicator (DDRI) of the Gram matrix to effectively assess the channel quality in XL-MIMO systems. Building upon this metric, conventional low-complexity schemes can be adaptively selected and reliably deployed for efficient implementation. Specifically, we first derive a closed-form expression for this metric under LoS conditions, and extend the analysis to NLoS conditions through the random matrix theory. Then, according to the derived results, we obtain a closed-form approximation of the proposed DDRI that admits O(1) complexity, enabling efficient evaluation of channel quality. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric.
