Prof. Jeffrey Andrews, along with his former PhD student Vikram Chandrasekhar (now at Texas Instruments) and postdoc Marios Kountouris (now on the faculty at the Supelec, Paris), have won the Best Paper award in Communication Theory at IEEE Globecom, the IEEE Communication Society's annual flagship conference.

Their early exploratory research on femtocell capacity and design issues has received significant interest but this is their first best paper award. The paper shows how multiple antennas should be used on femtocell access points to maximize coverage and capacity. Femtocells are mini-base stations that consumers can buy cheaply from their service provider and install in their house in order to increase the data rate and reliability of their cell phones and smart phones at home, but theyintroduce potentially serious interference issues to the network at large.

Prof. Andrews's research on femtocells has been supported by Dr. Alan Gatherer, the CTO of wireless infrastructure at Texas Instruments, who has also served as a collaborator on several of their contributions.