Professor Tonello is now chair of an IEEE committee on power line communications. He and his co-authors received two paper awards at the IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications.
Andrea Tonello has been elected Chair of the IEEE Communication Society Technical Committee on Power Line Communications for the term 2016 until 2018. The interests of the technical committee span all areas of communications over power lines (PLC). These include access, home networking, in-vehicle applications, utility applications. The areas of interest are the analytical, theoretical, simulation, experimental, and practical aspects of digital communications over power lines. The committee is one of the most active ones of the IEEE Communication Society with a large number of members. The committee organizes events in the power line communication area, sponsors conferences, contributes to the organization of technical events along ComSoc flagship conferences, and promotes the realization of special issues on leading journals and magazines. It also promotes the development of IEEE Standards in the area of power line communications.
The paper Characteristics of the PLC Channel: Reciprocity, Symmetry and Port Decoupling for Impedance Matching by Marco De Piante and Andrea Tonello has received the Best Paper Award at the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications held in Bottrop, Germany, March 20-23, 2016. The paper sheds new light on the understanding of the fundamental characteristics of the PLC broad band channel, the modem design, and the achievable performance in the challenging PLC communication media.
The paper Energy Efficiency Performance of Decode and Forward MIMO Relay PLC Systems by Wafae Bakkali, Pascal Pagani, Thierry Chonavel, Andrea Tonello has received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications. The work was carried out during the research visit of Ms. Wafae Bakkali (PhD student at Orange Labs, Telecom Bretagne, France) at NES in 2015. The paper shows that energy savings can be obtained by using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay assisted power line communication networks. The results exploit the measurements acquired by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Specialist Task Force 410, to which Pagani and Tonello have contributed in the past.
