Dr Liang Liu received the Best Paper Award 2021 from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for his paper “Massive Connectivity With Massive MIMO—Part I: Device Activity Detection and Channel Estimation” which was published on the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing journal in June 2018. The award honors the authors of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s technical scope, and appearing in one of the Society’s solely owned transactions irrespective of the author’s age. Device activity detection and channel estimation are crucial components for wireless massive connectivity applications. This paper shows that the vector AMP algorithm is a natural tool for sparse activity detection. Utilizing the state evolution analysis, both the missed detection and false alarm probabilities and channel estimation error can be analytically characterized. Further, in the massive MIMO regime, perfect device activity detection can be guaranteed, but channel estimation error remains.
