Award-winning doctoral dissertation could double the relay capacity of 5G networks

December 05, 2015

Finnish unions in the technical sector reward the best dissertation of the year 2014 in Finland within all engineering sciences. The finding made by Taneli Riihonen in his dissertation “Design and Analysis of Duplexing Modes and Forwarding Protocols for OFDM(A) Relay Links” could turn out to be a discovery worth hundreds of billions of euros globally that could solve the problem of data relay capacity in congested radio frequencies. The award ceremony is held in Helsinki today.

The doctoral dissertation of Taneli Riihonen, DSc (Tech) and Adjunct Assistant Professor and Visiting Associate Research Scientistwith the department of Electrical Engineering, is ground-breaking, and it has received great attention internationally. Dr. Riihonen demonstrated that it is possible to almost double the relay capacity of next generation 5G networks. As radio frequencies become more congested, the findings of Dr. Riihonen could turn out to be worth hundreds of billions of euros globally. The full-duplex relaying mode is a new and promising concept that has generated notable international interest, but little scientific research before this.

Dr. Riihonen prepared his dissertation in Finland for Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics. Professor Risto Wichman was the dissertation supervisor. Currently, Dr. Riihonen is a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York.

The value of the award granted by Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK and Tekniska Föreningen i Finland (TFiF) is EUR 7,500. The award is granted annually.

--Photo by Mariia Riihonen