I woke up a few hours before writing this post. The deadline for the master’s program was 12 PM today, and I had been working on it until 20 minutes before the deadline since yesterday. I know it doesn’t sound crazy, like who hasn’t worked on something overnight? But this is different; it was not supposed to be like this.
About one week prior of the deadline
I started to work on the research plan that I have to submit. Based on past publications (conferences, journals, and technical reports) from the lab, I came up with a reasonable research topic and I reached out to an associate researcher working at the lab. In fact, he is a gradute of my current lab. He didn’t provide any constructive feedback or deep insights because he didn’t to be familiar with the topic anyways, but that’s fine because I only wanted to ensure my proposal is original. He had no remarks regarding the originality so I guess it was fine.
About one day before the deadline
Despite the fact that I only had one day, I didn’t panick at all because I knew what I was going to write. However, when I checked the publications page on the lab’s website, I was shocked.
A paper with a very similar title to mine will be presented at an IEEE conference in Jan. 2025. It’s not a surprise that the topic is being researched because the trend (or the research direction) is quite clear, but I didn’t expect it to be published next year so soon.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t suprised that I didn’t notice this fact earlier. The abbreviation for cellular base station is usually BS when the paper focuses on a single generation of cellular networks (either 4G or 5G, but not both). However, base stations for each generation have unique names.
| Node B |
eNodeB (eNB) |
gNodeB (gNB) |
| Node B |
Evolved Node B |
Next Generation Node B |
| Radio base station in 3G networks |
Radio abse station in 4G networks |
Radio base station in 5G networks |
| 3G – UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) |
4G – LTE (Long Term Evolution) |
5G – NR (New Radio) |
| Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) |
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) |
OFDMA or Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) |
Basically my proposal was about 5G stations but at first I didn’t know 5G base station is literally gNB. I thought gNB is its own thing and usually paper titles do not abbreviate technology names. So, I had no idea that what I was proposing is basically the same thing that is going to be published next year.
The originality is crucial for the application, there’s even dedicated section for me to write about it. I had to come up with an entirely new research plan in just one night, which is why I woke up only a couple hours ago (around 19h00).
Nevertheless, I managed to do it, and it’s not bad (maybe even better than the previous one).