We have graduated from a wired past to a wireless present. The importance of a good, secure and reliable wireless connection is in higher demand now than ever, especially with the ongoing global pandemic that has limited our facetime severely. A few years ago, the big thing was 4G LTE – we have since moved on to the next epoch of wireless communication – enter 5G!

It is surprising how much the mundaneness of life can help us visualize some complex physical processes. For example, if there are frequent traffic jams on a particular road, one way to solve the problem would be to widen the road, allowing for a smoother, less taxing journey back home. In this example, the width of the road can be thought of as the bandwidth of any wireless system and each car an end user. The greater the bandwidth, the better the flow of information and thus faster communication. However, the scientific enterprise has revealed a much greater network of complexity surrounding the advent of 5G, which needs to be analyzed and untangled. This is where Dr Atiqa Kayani’s story comes in.

Just recently, Dr Atiqa successfully defended her PhD thesis, proposing a new way of beam forming strategies for wireless systems that require massive inputs and massive outputs (MIMO). By closely studying many critical parameters like signal to noise ratio, antenna array geometry and energy and spectral efficiency, Dr Atiqa was able to develop closed form expressions for three-dimensional spatial correlation function (3D-SCF) between two arbitrary points in 3D space. The proposed closed-form expression is independent of the antenna array geometry and is applicable for arbitrary antenna gain pattern and scattering power angle distribution function. She also presented a unified framework for energy and spectral efficient (EE-SE) systems, which simultaneously employ techniques from array processing for massive MIMO at mmWave frequency band. Moreover, she developed different hybrid precoding algorithm designs for single user and multi-user scenarios.

We extend our heartiest congratulations to Dr Atiqa for successfully defending her PhD and are very happy to announce that she has been placed in Huawei R&D (in Gothenburg, Sweden), starting 1st July, 2021. She works there as a 5G Communication System Algorithm and Channel Modelling Expert. She has previously worked on a fellowship position at the Wireless Networks Division in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Maryland USA.