Professor Chan Mun Choon’s Team Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE PIMRC 2026

A radio unit built entirely in software has earned Professor Chan Mun Choon and his team the Best Paper Award in Track 4 of IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) 2026.

The paper, "ProtO-RU: An O-RAN Split-7.2 Radio Unit Using SDRs", grew out of the Master's thesis of first author Zhiyu Zhou, a Master's graduate of NUS Computing whom Prof Chan supervised, alongside co-authors are Xin Zhe Khooi and Satis Kumar Perma.

Researchers building 5G testbeds on O-RAN, an open standard for mobile networks, have had to rely on commercial radio units, proprietary hardware they cannot modify or experiment with. ProtO-RU recreates the radio unit, the part of the network closest to the antenna, using ordinary computer processors and low-cost software-defined radios. The team showed that it works with two major open-source 5G software stacks and with commercial 5G devices, and that it runs stably through hour-long tests. It responds more slowly than commercial hardware and is built for research and prototyping. Because ProtO-RU is open source, other labs can use it to set up full O-RAN testbeds and try new ideas at the radio unit itself.

The award was one of six at PIMRC 2026, held in Singapore from 1 to 4 September. Each track named a single best paper, and ProtO-RU was chosen from the 117 papers submitted to Track 4.