Two 6G professors awarded prestigious IEEE Fellow honour
Professors Aarno Pärssinen and Mika Ylianttila from the University of Oulu have received significant international recognition. The world’s leading professional organisation for advancing technology, IEEE, has awarded them the title of IEEE Fellow. It is awarded to individuals who have made particularly significant contributions to the development of technology worldwide. Both Pärssinen and Ylianttila work in the 6G Flagship programme.
The IEEE bestows the prestigious Fellow designation on fewer than 0.1% of its voting members each year through a rigorous evaluation, marking it as a highly esteemed honour by the leading global association for technological advancement. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement.
Only about 30 IEEE members of the IEEE Finland Section have ever been elevated to the grade of Fellow. It´s rare that one unit has five IEEE Fellows, as is currently the case at the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Oulu. At CWC, Aarno Pärssinen is a professor in the Radio Technologies unit, and Mika Ylianttila is a professor in the Networks and Systems unit.
From theory to practice in the development of 6G
Professor Pärssinen leads a radio engineering (RF) research group that focuses on various technologies in the discipline, from RF integrated circuits to antennas and radio propagation. This includes system and architecture analysis, RF algorithms, and measurement techniques for future communications systems, like 6G. He was awarded for contributions to direct conversion, digital RF transceivers, and hardware-aware communications systems.
”I´ve been privileged to work with many talented, dedicated and hardworking people in academia and in industry, and sometimes in between, over the past 30 years. Colleagues, students, teachers, and friends with whom I’ve been able to share thoughts, brainstorm, learn and achieve something together deserve my gratitude”, says Pärssinen.
His early achievements were related to direct conversion receivers for 3G and later techniques to more digital-oriented RF transmitter and receiver architectures. Those have been the foundations for the current research. As part of the team at the Nokia Research Center, he was also one of the original contributors to the Bluetooth low energy extension, now called BT LE, contributing to many aspects that enabled very long button cell battery lifetime for IoT radios when co-optimizing the RF HW solutions and radio protocols. During the past ten years at the University of Oulu, he has broadened and deepened the scope of communications-oriented RF research at the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) and contributed to 5G and 6G technologies from hardware aware radio link analysis to new RF transceiver architectural approaches and RF front-ends at frequencies from lower mmW spectrum up to 300 GHz.
”In my field, theoretical ideas must be proven with experiments that often require new solutions in microelectronics from integrated circuits to antennas and packaging. All that taking the latest trends in communications research into account. Sometimes, experimental findings from prototypes also lead to new theoretical observations. This is time-consuming and requires resilience and perseverance. A multi-disciplinary approach with open discussion between experts of different disciplines is the key to finding something new. Openness with courage to expose ideas that sound impossible keeps the mind fresh. Still, the outcome should be something that can be finally implemented and verified by measurements. I can’t overemphasise the value of the teamwork and spirit inside the group and also together with the other groups in CWC and in other research units”, muses Pärssinen.
Network security at the core of 6G
Professor Ylianttila leads the NetSEC research group, focusing on network security, trust, and privacy. This group studies, for example, the network security of AI-assisted communications systems. He has supervised 16 doctoral dissertations as the main supervisor and more than 90 master’s theses, and according to Google Scholar, he is among the 30 most cited researchers at the University of Oulu.
“I´d like to thank the CWC research centre and all the researchers and colleagues who have collaborated, especially in the areas of mobility management and network security, on which my nomination was based. I would especially like to commemorate the recently passed away Professor Kaveh Pahlavan from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), who was the principal supervisor of my doctoral dissertation and also made the Fellow nomination proposal. The nomination underlines the significance of the topics studied and the impact of the results achieved, e.g., the number of citations gained by the published research articles. Our mobility management research took place at a transition phase of 3G and 4G technologies when the seamless interworking of different wireless networks was an essential research topic that my doctoral dissertation also focused on. Since then, the importance of wireless network security has become more important, which is related to our more recent research results on the security of 5G and 6G systems”, says Ylianttila.
In more than 200 peer-reviewed research publications, Ylianttila and his research group have addressed in their research software-defined network solutions, mobile edge computing, utilisation of blockchain technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and their network security and trust mechanisms, and evaluated their combined effects on the performance and energy consumption, taking into account the requirements of 5G and 6G systems. Recent research has focused on the security of distributed AI methods, which must take into account the new vulnerabilities brought about by new AI methods and how they can be protected by increasing the system’s internal defence mechanisms.
“We are now living at an exciting new transition phase, where artificial intelligence methods and tools are being developed extensively for telecommunications systems that enable both new kinds of attacks and defence mechanisms. Our research contributes to the development of solutions that increase the ability of systems to defend themselves and recover quickly from attacks”, Ylianttila concludes.
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000-plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority in a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to advancing technology, the IEEE publishes 30 per cent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields and has developed more than 1300 active industry standards. The association also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 1700 international technical conferences each year.
In addition to Pärssinen and Ylianttila, no other Finns were on the IEEE Fellows list this year. In recent years, professors Matti Latva-aho (2024), Guoying Zhao (2022), Mehdi Bennis (2021), Markku Juntti (2020), and Matti Pietikäinen (2011) have been awarded from the University of Oulu.
Learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program here.
Check out the 2025 IEEE Fellows list (pdf).
Watch 6G Talks video presentations by Professors Aarno Pärssinen and Mika Ylianttila.