We are pleased to share that the paper titled “Divergence Meets Dispersion: Efficient Wideband Beam Training for XL-MIMO”, co-authored by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Ran Li and Ph.D. student Ziyi Xu under the supervision of Prof. Angela Zhang, has received the Best Paper Award at IEEE WCNC 2026. IEEE WCNC (Wireless Communications and Networking Conference) is a flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society, and only four papers were selected for this prestigious award this year.

The award-winning work addresses the challenge of wideband beam training in near-field extremely large MIMO (XL-MIMO) systems. Conventional near-field focusing beams are highly sensitive to alignment errors and require substantial spectral resources for beam sweeping. Drawing inspiration from the light dispersion phenomenon in optics, the team proposes a novel diverging-and-dispersion (DnD) beam training scheme. By leveraging beam divergence to expand spatial coverage and beam dispersion to enable frequency-dependent beam splitting, the proposed approach achieves near-optimal performance while significantly reducing resource consumption compared to existing methods.

This recognition highlights the Department’s continued excellence in advancing next-generation wireless communication technologies. Congratulations to Prof. Zhang and her team!