SPS Feed

One year has passed since I began my term as the editor-in-chief (EiC) of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM). It has been a busy first year, with a rich set of challenges that go beyond those I have experienced in previous volunteer positions. This is welcome: with giving back to our community comes the desire to grow through new challenges and experiences, especially for those of us approaching our wiser years.

As wireless technology begins to utilize physically larger arrays and/or higher frequencies, the transmitter and receiver will reside in each other’s radiative near field. This fact gives rise to unusual propagation phenomena, such as spherical wavefronts and beam focusing, creating the impression that new spatial dimensions—called degrees of freedom (DOF)—can be exploited in the near field.

Multichannel signal processing technologies are moving toward the deployment of small and densely packed sensors yielding extremely large aperture arrays (ELAAs) in order to provide higher angular resolution and beamforming gain. In particular, technologies are moving beyond the fifth-generation (5G) networks, wherein the adoption of ELAAs or surfaces and the exploitation of higher-frequency bands, e.g., terahertz