The paper “Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multiuser Communications: Framework, Algorithms, and Analysis” published by Dr Liang Liu and his Research Associate, Mr Zhaorui Wang, in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications journal in October 2020 was listed as an Essential Science Indicators (ESI) Hot Paper on the Web of Science. Hot papers are papers that receive a large number of citations soon after publication, relative to other papers of the same field and age. They are papers published in the past two years that received a number of citations in the most recent two-month period that places them in the top 0.1% of papers in the same field. In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted communication systems, the acquisition of channel state information is a crucial impediment for achieving the beamforming gain of IRS because of the considerable overhead required for channel estimation. A novel three-phase pilot-based channel estimation framework for IRS-assisted uplink multiuser communications was proposed in this top-performing paper.
