Oulu PhD on ultra-reliable wireless wins IEEE Finland award
Dian Echevarría Pérez has been awarded the IEEE Finland Chapter on Signal Processing and Circuits and Systems (SP/CAS) prize for the best dissertation of 2026. The thesis titled Statistical resource allocation for ultra-reliable wireless networks was completed at the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu. The work was supervised by Professor Hirley Alves and Associate Professor Onel L. A. López.
The winners were announced in September, and the awards were given at a lunch held at the University of Oulu on 5 October. Eetu Pöyry from Tampere University received the Award for Best Master’s Thesis for his research into antennas for full-duplex radios.
A robot working on a factory floor or a machine operated from a remote location requires a link which fails very rarely and responds in milliseconds. It is difficult to ensure this. The same radio resources are used for normal mobile traffic, and the network generally does not know the present state of each device’s channel.
The thesis presents three methods of dealing with that gap. The first involves taking over measurements from previous observations of key devices and combining these with new data obtained from broadband users. The second makes use of extreme value theory, a statistical framework designed for rare events, to model the worst possible situation for a link and to set aside resources in anticipation of it. The third consists in creating statistical radio maps; these enable the network to predict the quality of a link in areas where it has never before made measurements and to determine when a moving device should switch base stations, all while conserving energy.
“Receiving this award is a wonderful way to mark the end of my doctoral journey. It reflects years of hard work, persistence, and many lessons learned along the way. I am very grateful to my supervisors for their trust, guidance, and support throughout these years, and to everyone who was part of this journey,” said Dian Echevarría Pérez.
Hirley Alves received the award on Pérez’s behalf. “We are honoured to receive this award. It shows Dian’s careful pairing of statistics and optimisation to solve industry-relevant problems. His methods let a network promise reliability at a location before a device has even reached it,” said Alves.
Echevarría Pérez defended the thesis on 31 October 2025, with Professor Sinem Coleri from Koç University serving as the opponent. The thesis was approved with distinction. Echevarría Pérez has a master’s degree in wireless communications engineering from the University of Oulu and joined CWC in 2019 after working in telematics at ETECSA in Cuba.
The IEEE Finland SP/CAS section organises the competition annually and in 2025 both prizes were awarded to researchers from the University of Oulu.