IEEE JSTSP Special Issue on Low-Bit-Resolution Signal Processing: Algorithms, Implementations, and Applications

Manuscript Due: 30 January 2025
Publication Date: September 2025

As the integrated circuits industry and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies continue to thrive, it is feasible to process signals with increased bandwidth and high frequency. However, full resolution processing may not be preferable or practical in some settings since it may result in huge increase in power consumption and hardware costs, especially in large-scale antenna array systems such as the multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems, or wireless systems using higher-frequency bands such as ultrawideband radar (UWB). Toward this end, reducing the quantization resolution at both the system level and the processing level may be necessary. Low-bit-resolution (such as 1-bit) signal processing with hardware-efficient architectures (such as low-bit ADCs and DACs) and real-time implementations (such as digital RF processing via advanced FPGA, cost-effective RFSoC design with emerging processing methods) has become a key enabling technique to balance the trade-off between performance, hardware complexity, cost, power consumption, and computation time. Although low-bit-resolution signal processing has great potential in research areas such as signal recovery and analysis, beamforming, target detection and localization, integrated sensing and communications (serving as essential parts of future wireless communication systems, radar, internet of things networks, etc.), it introduces new challenges in both understanding the theoretic limits and designing the processing schemes with low-bit-resolution solutions. This special issue aims to provide an important platform to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to introduce their most recent original works on low-bit-resolution signal processing, and catalyze new developments in this increasingly important area.

Under the constraint of low-bit-resolution signal processing, topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Performance bound analysis
  • Compressive sensing, signal recovery and analysis
  • Target detection/localization, and direction of arrival estimation
  • Digital beamforming
  • Parameter measurement
  • Precoding and decoding
  • Integrated sensing and communication
  • Digital automotive radar
  • Artificial intelligence and neural networks
  • Reconfigurable intelligent surface technology
  • Multimedia processing
  • High-throughput satellite communications
  • Industrial IoT
  • Hardware/software based real-time implementations

The Guest Editors also welcome creative papers outside the areas listed above but related to the overall scope of the special issue. Prospective authors may contact the Guest Editors to ascertain interest on topics that are not listed, and should follow the instructions given on the IEEE JSTSP webpage and submit their manuscripts via the ScholarOne submission system. All submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed according to the standard IEEE process. 

Important Dates

  • Manuscript submission due: 30 January 2025
  • First round of reviews due: 31 March 2025
  • Revised manuscript due: 15 May 2025
  • Second round of reviews due: 15 June 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2025
  • Publication: September 2025

Guest Editors

​For further information, please contact the guest editors at: