Electrical and computer engineering professor wins IEEE Communications Society’s best paper award

Published: May 27, 2021 8:43 AM

By Cassie Montgomery

Shiwen Mao, the Earle C. Williams Eminent Scholar Chair and professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his collaborators have received the IEEE Communications Society’s 2021 Outstanding Paper Award. Their winning paper is titled “Optimized Computation Offloading Performance in Virtual Edge Computing Systems via Deep Reinforcement Learning” and was published in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal in June 2019. The award will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications in June. 

The paper presents a design of optimized computation offloading policies for a virtual mobile edge computing (MEC) system. Under the dual constraints of dynamic wireless access channel and mobile device’s energy consumption, a novel double deep Q-network (DQN)-based strategic computation offloading algorithm is proposed to learn the optimal policy without requiring a priori knowledge of network dynamics.

“It is a nice surprise and great honor to receive this award,” Mao said. “I feel fortunate to collaborate with these outstanding researchers, and am really glad to see Auburn’s wireless engineering continue to make an impact in the field.”

Mao, who is also the director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center at Auburn, collaborated on the winning paper with VTT Technical Research Center of Finland’s Xianfu Chen, Honggang Zhang of Zhejiang University in China, Celimuge Wu of The University of Electro-Communications in Japan, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics’s Yusheng Ji and Mehdi Bennis of the University of Oulu in Finland. 

The IEEE Communications Society’s Outstanding Paper Award was established and awarded in 2021 for the first time. It covers the emerging interdisciplinary and cutting-edge research directions in the field of communications and networking. The award-winning paper was selected from the nearly 10,000 papers published in the past three years in the 14 journals and transactions of the IEEE Communications Society. The selection criteria include originality, impact and writing. Only one paper will be selected for the award per year. 

Media Contact: Cassie Montgomery, cmontgomery@auburn.edu, 334.844.3668

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