EARS: Collaborative Research: Overcoming Propagation Challenges at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies via Reconfigurable Antennas

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Wireless communication systems are in increasingly high demand among industry, government, and the public, even while a large swath of the radio spectrum in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band goes underutilized. Such network systems support diverse uses such as smart grid electrical infrastructure, homeland security, military applications, environmental monitoring, and medical and transportation advances. To meet demand, cellular providers need access to more bandwidth, which also happens to be their primary capital expenditure. By making better use of available spectrum in the 30-300 GHz, i.e., mm-wave band, providers not only could offer less costly service, but also could potentially make transformative cellular access and coverage improvements for current customers and the underserved. This project addresses a number of stubborn technical obstacles limiting mm-wave band use. To overcome these challenges, a multidisciplinary team will extend signal processing, communication theory, and electromagnetics knowledge to develop novel reconfigurable antennas and communication technologies for this band. Further, strong industry connections among team members will help facilitate commercialization. The project also includes goals to share a mm-wave testbed with industry and the public for remote testing, and to educate students at several universities--notably at California State University, Bakersfield, which primarily serves underrepresented students.The project goal is to leverage the additional degrees of freedom provided by a new reconfigurable antenna design to establish new beamforming and beamsteering methodologies that overcome substantive propagation challenges at mm-wave frequencies. The project can also significantly impact electrical engineering, computer and information science, and the mathematical and physical sciences. Outcomes will include: (1) NEW ANTENNAS. The proposed reconfigurable antennas have various states, each with varying and predefined radiation patterns. Hence, they will support simultaneous transmission of multiple radiation patterns, each with large directional gain. The former provides beam diversity to overcome mm-wave frequency shadowing, while the latter reduces power amplifier design constraints; (2) NEW METHODS. More degrees of freedom will enable new precoding, beamforming, and beamsteering approaches to overcome pathloss, shadowing, and channel sparsity; (3) VALIDATION. Outcome validation on the Boise State University testbed will ensure that researchers can realize projected gains in realistic hardware and propagation settings at mm-wave frequencies; (4) NEW FRAMEWORK. A new framework for state division multiple access will use various reconfigurable antenna states and their corresponding known radiation patterns to serve multiple users; (5) EXPERTISE. Investigators across four academic institutions in Idaho, California, and Wisconsin share complementary expertise, and academic and industry experiences.