Southampton professor receives the Eric E Sumner Field Award for his significant contribution to developing wireless mobile communications

Professor Lajos Hanzo from Electronics and Computer Science has been presented with the IEEE 2022 Eric E Sumner Award which is given to an individual or team of three or less people for their outstanding contributions to communications technology.

IEEE Fellow Lajos was selected by the panel for his essential contributions to multimedia signal compression; joint source and channel coding; modulation; networking; caching; and security aspects of 3G, 4G, 5G, and emerging mobile communications systems.

They also noted that his work on adaptive quadrature amplitude modulation (AQAM) provided a strong antifading countermeasure, and the AQAM-based high-speed packet access for 3G/4G systems has been used in countless mobile phones and digital audio//video broadcast, as well as WiFi systems.

Lajos has also contributed to the seminal research of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, which became part of the 4G standard, and under his European Research Council Advanced Fellow Grant, he influenced the evolution of quantum signal processing and communications.

He said: "I was humbled, thrilled and deeply touched by this generous recognition, but research is a collaborative endeavour and the past 36 years of exhilarating collaborations at Southampton flashed through my mind when I was notified about this distinction. I have fond memories of our congenial journey in research with all of my academic colleagues, postdocs, visitors and the team of 125 PhD students. I feel very grateful for the enlightenment I gained throughout our close collaboration.

"Receiving this award fills me with further inspiration as an eternal student of my discipline."

The IEEE Eric E Sumner Award was established in 1995 and is named in honour of 1991 IEEE President Eric E Sumner, who retired as Vice-President, Operations Planning, at AT&T Bell Laboratories after a long and distinguished career.