We are please to announced that Professor Harald Haas, Director of the LRDC, is one of six co-authors who have won the IEEE Neal Shepherd Memorial Best Propagation Award for their paper: Pervasive Wireless Channel Modeling Theory and Applications to 6G GBSMs for All Frequency Bands and All Scenarios, as published in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, September 2022.
Meet the authors
The award recognises the outstanding contributions to propagation research of Professor Cheng-Xiang Wang, lead author, and co-authors Zhen Lv, Dr Xiqi Gao, Professors Xiaohu You and Yang Hao, and Professor Haas.
Designing the future of 6G
As 5G networks roll out worldwide, researchers are already looking ahead to the next generation of wireless technology: 6G. While 5G focused on making our phones faster and connecting smart homes, 6G aims for something much bigger – total global coverage. To achieve this, the 6G environment will have to work everywhere at once. It will need to beam data using everything from standard radio waves to invisible light, and operate seamlessly on the ground, in the air, out at sea, and even in deep space. This means 6G won’t just connect our phones; it will simultaneously link up space satellites, flying drones, cargo ships, ultra-high-speed bullet trains, and automated factories.
However, making a single network function across all these different environments introduces a massive puzzle for scientists. For example, ultra-fast terahertz signals can carry huge amounts of data, but they are easily blocked by walls and absorbed by the air. Meanwhile, low Earth orbit satellites move so fast that their signals get distorted by a severe “pitch-change” effect (known as a Doppler shift), similar to how a siren changes sound as it speeds past you. Bullet trains experience these same distortions while zooming through fast-changing landscapes.
Right now, efforts to solve these problems and build a reliable 6G network are stuck in a bottleneck. To fix signal issues, engineers rely on computer simulations called “channel models” to test how waves behave. Unfortunately, every model we have today was built for older technology and can only handle one environment at a time. Because no existing system can simulate space, sea, and high-speed land travel all at once, researchers are left without a unified blueprint to design the future of 6G.
A 6G Pervasive Channel Model
In response to this, the authors of the paper proposed a unified, pervasive channel modelling theory and built a 6G Pervasive Channel Model (6GPCM) based on a geometry‑based stochastic framework. This model:
- Covers all frequency bands from sub‑6 GHz to visible light
- Supports all major scenarios, including satellite, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), maritime, massive multiple input, multiple output (MIMO), reflective intelligent surfaces (RIS) and high‑mobility environments
- Can be simplified to match specific use cases and includes existing 5G models as special cases; and
- Has been validated against real measurement data, showing strong accuracy and applicability
In their work, the authors also derived and simulated the model’s statistical properties, and compared them with real measurement data, with results showing that the all-in-one channel model is accurate, widely applicable and suited to the diverse needs of future 6G systems.
The award will be presented at the IEEE VTS Awards Luncheon, to be held at the upcoming VTC2026-Fall conference, 6 – 9 September in Boston, MA, USA.
Read the full paper for a full exploration of the authors’ work.