IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters

Overview

IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (abbreviated IEEE Antennas Wirel. Propag. Lett., commonly shortened to AWPL) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of short, high-impact manuscripts in antennas and wireless propagation. It is an official journal of the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society (IEEE AP-S), published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the United States.

Founded in 2002, AWPL was designed from the outset as a "letters" journal: concise papers, an accelerated peer-review process, and online-first publication so that new theoretical and experimental results reach the antennas and propagation community as quickly as possible. Once accepted, papers appear in IEEE Xplore soon after acceptance; a single printed issue published once a year compiles all of the papers accepted during that year. The journal was the first primarily online publication of the IEEE, a pioneering model in 2002 that anticipated today's standard of continuous, digital-first scholarly publishing.

Because it sits at the intersection of antenna engineering, electromagnetics, and wireless systems, AWPL has become one of the most widely read short-format venues in its field. Authors from academia and industry use the journal to announce compact, self-contained advances — a new antenna topology, a propagation model, a metasurface design, or a measurement technique — without waiting through the longer review cycles of full-length transaction papers. The journal publishes continuously, with new articles appearing in IEEE Xplore on a rolling basis.

Within the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society's publishing portfolio, AWPL occupies a distinctive niche. IEEE TAP publishes comprehensive full-length studies; the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine carries reviews, tutorials, and feature articles; and the IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation (launched in 2020) provides a fully open-access venue for longer papers. AWPL complements all of these by offering the fastest route from manuscript to publication for short, self-contained results. For a researcher with a compact but significant finding — a novel radiator measured and validated, a propagation result with clear practical implications — AWPL is typically the first choice within the Society's journals.

The journal also plays a notable role in early-career development. Short letters are an accessible first step into IEEE AP-S publishing: the format forces clarity of argument, the review process is streamlined, and the turnaround is fast, giving graduate students and early-career researchers timely feedback and a citable IEEE Xplore record. The introduction of the 2026 IEEE AP-S Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Paper Award, aimed at young professionals, underlines the Society's intent to keep the journal attractive to new entrants in the field.

AWPL is frequently cited alongside its sister publication, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (IEEE TAP), as one of the two flagship journals of the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society. Where IEEE TAP focuses on comprehensive, full-length investigations, AWPL focuses on brevity and speed: short manuscripts that deliver a clear, verified technical contribution quickly to the research community.

History

The Letters were founded in 2002 by Prof. Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), who served as the founding Editor-in-Chief. His vision was to establish a faster means for researchers in the antennas and propagation field to publish their results, while maintaining very high standards for the journal. From the beginning, AWPL was built to take full advantage of the internet: papers, once accepted, were made available for consultation in IEEE Xplore soon thereafter, while the printed issue — published just once a year — included every paper accepted in the Letters during that year.

The journal's early years coincided with rapid growth in wireless communications, and AWPL quickly established itself as the venue for short-format results in antenna design, ultrawideband (UWB) systems, and propagation modeling. Key milestones in the journal's development include:

• 2002 — AWPL is founded by Piergiorgio Uslenghi (UIC); it becomes the first primarily online publication of the IEEE, with only one printed issue per year compiling all accepted papers.
• 2008 — The Uslenghi Award is introduced, honoring outstanding contributions in the Letters.
• 2011 — AWPL introduces "special clusters," themed collections of papers on emerging topics. This was the first time the "cluster" model was used in IEEE publications, and the format was later adopted by other IEEE journals.
• 2025 — AWPL attains Q1 status in the Journal Citation Reports in the categories of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications Engineering.
• 2026 — The IEEE AP-S Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Paper Award is introduced, recognizing young professionals publishing in the journal's community.

The journal's editorial leadership over more than two decades reflects the international character of the antennas and propagation community, with editors-in-chief drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong (see Editorial Leadership below).

Aims and Scope

The official description of the journal, published by the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society, states that the Letters is "an archival journal devoted to the rapid publication of new theoretical and experimental results in all areas of interest to the Antennas and Propagation Society."

The Society's field of interest — which defines the journal's topical scope — includes antennas (analysis, design, development, measurement, and testing); radiation, propagation, and the interaction of electromagnetic waves with discrete and continuous media; and applications and systems pertinent to antennas, propagation, and sensing. This encompasses topics such as applied optics, millimeter- and sub-millimeter-wave techniques, antenna signal processing and control, radio astronomy, and the propagation and radiation aspects of terrestrial and space-based communication, including wireless, mobile, satellite, and telecommunications systems.

In practice, AWPL manuscripts frequently cover:

• Antenna design and analysis — microstrip/patch antennas, slot antennas, dielectric resonator antennas, reflectarrays and transmitarrays, MIMO and diversity antennas, wideband and multiband antennas, reconfigurable antennas.
• Electromagnetic propagation — channel modeling, indoor and outdoor propagation, millimeter-wave and terahertz propagation, atmospheric effects, urban and rural path-loss models.
• Metamaterials and metasurfaces — polarization converters, absorbers, electromagnetic band-gap structures, frequency-selective surfaces, coding metasurfaces.
• Wireless systems and applications — 5G/6G antenna systems, RFID, satellite antennas, wearable and implantable antennas, antennas for IoT devices, radar and sensing.
• Measurement and computational methods — near-field and far-field measurement techniques, antenna characterization, efficient numerical methods for electromagnetics.
• Special clusters on emerging topics — periodic themed collections addressing fast-moving research areas relevant to the AP-S community.

Manuscripts submitted to AWPL are expected to be short and focused: the journal's format is the "letter," a concise report of a single well-defined technical contribution with clear novelty, supported by simulation and/or measurement results.

Editorial Leadership

The current Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters is Prof. Steven Gao (formally Steven Shichang Gao), Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he is also Director of the Center for Intelligent Electromagnetic Systems. This was confirmed by the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society in 2026 publications (including the 2026 special clusters call for proposals, which directs submissions to Prof. Gao) and by the journal's official site.

Prof. Gao received his PhD in Microwave Engineering from Shanghai University, China, in 1999. Before joining CUHK in 2022, he was Professor at the University of Kent, UK (2013–2022), where he is now an Honorary Professor, and previously held positions at the University of Surrey, Northumbria University, and the University of Birmingham. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the IET (UK), and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (UK). He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (2014–2016) and the UK representative in the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (2020–2022). His research interests include smart/intelligent antennas, phased arrays, MIMO, reconfigurable antennas, filtering antennas, and antennas for mobile terminals and satellites. He has co-authored over 600 papers, three books, and over 20 patents.

Past editors-in-chief of the Letters:

Editorial correspondence for the Letters is directed to the Editor-in-Chief via the IEEE AP-S office (email: awpl@ieeeaps.org), and manuscripts are submitted through the journal's dedicated Manuscript Central site.

Journal Identifiers and Metrics

The journal's standard bibliographic identifiers are:

Indexing: AWPL is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and Current Contents / Engineering, Computing & Technology, and is indexed in Scopus.

Citation metrics (attributed, third-party-reported): the journal's 2022 Journal Impact Factor was reported as 4.2 by the Journal Citation Reports (via secondary reporting); it attained Q1 JCR status in 2025 in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications Engineering (per the journal's official site). Secondary metrics aggregators report a CiteScore of 8.3, an SNIP of 1.63 (researcher.life), an SJR of approximately 1.68 with a Q1 best quartile in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and an h-index of 159 (resurchify.com). These third-party figures should be treated as indicative rather than official: only the JCR Impact Factor and quartile data derive from the official ranking body.

Acceptance rate: not officially published. Open-access article processing charge (APC): not officially published for this journal — IEEE offers optional open access for many of its journals, but no journal-specific APC figure for AWPL was found in official sources; authors should consult IEEE's current open-access policy pages.

Submission Information

Manuscripts are submitted to AWPL through the journal's dedicated Manuscript Central portal at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/awpl. New submissions go through the journal's editorial board, with review coordinated by the Editor-in-Chief's office. Editorial and general questions about the Letters can be directed to the Editor-in-Chief via awpl@ieeeaps.org.

As a letters journal, AWPL prioritizes concise manuscripts reporting new theoretical or experimental results. Authors should consult the journal's current Author Information page (linked from the official AWPL website) for page limits, formatting requirements, and guidance on preparing short-format manuscripts. The journal's published aim is speed: it strives to be one of the fastest journals in the IEEE portfolio, with the goal of having accepted papers appear in IEEE Xplore approximately two months after submission.

AWPL also periodically publishes special clusters — themed collections on emerging research topics and new developments in the AP-S field of interest. Calls for special-cluster proposals are announced by the IEEE AP-S (for example, the 2026 special clusters call), inviting guest-editor teams from multiple institutions and countries to propose timely topics.

Landmark and Highly Cited Papers

Over its history, AWPL has published many widely cited short papers that became standard references in antenna engineering. Below are representative, well-documented examples with verified DOIs (all resolve to the IEEE Xplore record of the paper):

• Ultra-wideband slot antennas: Lei Zhu, Rong Fu, and Keli Wu, "A novel broadband microstrip-fed wide slot antenna with double rejection zeros," IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 2, pp. 194–196, 2003. DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2003.819689. An early landmark from the journal's founding era, demonstrating how compact printed slot antennas could achieve broadband operation with built-in interference rejection.
• Band-notched UWB monopoles: "A Band-Notched Ultrawideband Printed Monopole Antenna," IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 5, pp. 495–498, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2006.886303. This paper contributed to the wave of UWB antenna designs that defined the mid-2000s, when band-notched techniques were essential for coexistence with WLAN systems.
• Metasurface polarization control: Q. Sun and colleagues, "Reconfigurable linear-to-linear polarization conversion metasurface based on PIN diodes," IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 17, p. 1722, 2018. DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2018.2864797. A representative example of the reconfigurable-intelligent-surface research that became a dominant AWPL topic in the late 2010s.
• Low-RCS reconfigurable antennas: K. Kandasamy, B. Majumder, J. Mukherjee, and K. P. Ray, "Low RCS and polarization reconfigurable antenna using cross-slot-based metasurface," IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 14, pp. 1638–1641, 2015. DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2015.2415585. Combined radar-cross-section reduction with polarization reconfigurability, two themes of lasting importance in antenna research.
• Frequency- and polarization-reconfigurable metasurfaces: C. Ni, M. S. Chen, Z. X. Zhang, and X. L. Wu, "Design of frequency- and polarization-reconfigurable antenna based on the polarization conversion metasurface," IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 78–81, 2018. DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2017.2775444.

These papers illustrate the journal's editorial arc: from printed UWB antennas in the early 2000s, through multiband and notched-band designs, to metasurface-enabled reconfigurable antennas in the 2010s and 2020s — closely tracking the wireless industry's evolution from early Wi-Fi/UWB coexistence to 5G, 6G, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.

Readers looking for a broader survey of any of these themes will find that AWPL's special clusters — periodic themed collections introduced in 2011 as the first such format in IEEE publishing — gather many of the leading short papers on a fast-moving topic in one place, making them useful entry points into emerging areas such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, millimeter-wave front ends, and antennas for satellite constellations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does AWPL stand for?

AWPL stands for IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, the rapid-publication letters journal of the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society. Its ISO 4 abbreviation is IEEE Antennas Wirel. Propag. Lett.

Who publishes AWPL?

AWPL is an official journal of the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the United States.

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief?

Prof. Steven Gao of The Chinese University of Hong Kong has served as Editor-in-Chief since 2023 (confirmed by IEEE AP-S official communications). He is an IEEE Fellow whose research focuses on smart antennas, phased arrays, MIMO, and reconfigurable antennas.

When was AWPL founded?

The journal was founded in 2002 by Prof. Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi of the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was the first primarily online publication of the IEEE.

What are the ISSNs of AWPL?

The print ISSN is 1536-1225. The electronic ISSN is reported by secondary bibliographic sources as 1548-5757; this should be confirmed against IEEE Xplore for formal citation purposes.

How fast is the review and publication process?

AWPL is designed for rapid dissemination: accepted papers appear in IEEE Xplore soon after acceptance, and the journal states a goal of publication in IEEE Xplore approximately two months after submission. Official acceptance-rate and average review-time statistics are not published by the journal.

Is AWPL open access?

AWPL is primarily a subscription journal accessed through IEEE Xplore, with IEEE's optional open-access routes available to authors. A journal-specific APC figure is not officially published; authors should check IEEE's current open-access terms.

What is the impact factor of AWPL?

The 2022 Journal Impact Factor was reported as 4.2 (Journal Citation Reports, via secondary reporting). In 2025 the journal attained Q1 JCR status in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications Engineering, according to the journal's official site.

How do I submit a paper to AWPL?

Manuscripts are submitted through Manuscript Central at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/awpl. Questions may be directed to the Editor-in-Chief's office at awpl@ieeeaps.org.

What are AWPL special clusters?

Special clusters are themed collections of papers on emerging research topics, introduced by AWPL in 2011 as the first use of the "cluster" model in IEEE publications. Guest-editor proposals are invited periodically through calls published by the IEEE AP-S.