New research on gigabit wireless communications from the University of Bristol in the U.K. could have significant implications for the future of mobile devices.
Two research papers presented at IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) in Turkey last week focused on the millimeter-wave band (58-63GHz), in which the researchers believe short-rage gigabit wireless communication capable of handing future data-rate hungry applications could operate.
The effort was led by Andrew Nix, professor of wireless communication systems and Simon Armour, Ph.D., senior lecturer in software radio from the University of Bristol’s Communication Systems and Networks research group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
In the first paper, “Polarimetric filtering for an enhanced multi-user 60GHz WPAN system,” researchers considered enhanced technologies and algorithms as a means of increasing the data capacity and densification of short-rage wireless networks and found that use of polarimetric filtering can enable a higher density of active data links. According to the U-Bristol team, each millimeter wave link is capable of supporting user rates of up to 7Gbps and up to four simultaneous links could be active in a single room. These data capacities are 100 times better than those achieved with current Wi-Fi technologies.
Djamal Berraki, a PhD student working on the gigabit wireless communications project, produced a video to demonstrate the capabilities of the simulator.
The second research paper, “Application of compressive sensing in sparse spatial channel recovery for beamforming in mmWave outdoor systems,” looked at beamforming as a solution to provide multi-gigabit connections between the 4G and 5G cellular base stations and the core network.
Currently, cellular network data rates are often limited by the backhaul, or link to the core network. To alleviate this problem, the U-Bristol team proposed an adaptive beamforming algorithm capable of extending the network range and data rate while also reducing interference. The paper used compressive sensing to significantly reduce the amount of control data needed to adapt the network to temporal and spatial changes in the channel.
“Both research papers represent an important contribution in the quest to address the ever increasing user demand for higher data rates and capacities,” Nix said. “We are fast running out of radio spectrum in the lower frequency bands where cellular and Wi-Fi current operation. As a result we need to exploit high frequencies in future products.”
