Engineers pioneer high-speed wireless data
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Engineers pioneer high-speed wireless data

An international research programme is responding to an increasing demand of internet traffic to develop widespread data coverage with unprecedented speed at millimetre waves. 

Emerging technologies such as telemedicine, internet of things (IoT), 4K video streaming, driverless cars and augmented reality applications will need zettabytes of wireless data.

Due to limitations to the amount of data which can be transmitted by microwaves, the only way to provide data with fast download speeds is through covering urban areas with dense grids of micro, nano and pico ‘cells’, at microwave frequencies.

€2.9m Horizon 2020 project ULTRAWAVE, led by engineers at Lancaster University, UK, aims to build technologies capable of manipulating the millimetre wave spectrum beyond 100GHz.

Professor Claudio Paoloni, co-ordinator of ULTRAWAVE and head of engineering at Lancaster University, said: “When speeds of wireless networks equal fibre, billions of new rapid connections will help 5G become a reality.

“It is exciting to think that the EU Horizon 2020 ULTRAWAVE project could be a major milestone towards solving one of the main obstacles to future 5G networks, which is the ubiquitous wireless distribution of fibre-level high data rates.”

ULTRAWAVE aims to create an ultra-capacity layer to achieve the 100 gigabit of data per second threshold, which is easy to deploy.

The layer will be able to feed data to hundreds of small and pico cells, regardless of the density of mobile devices in each cell, which could widen the potential for new network paradigms and architectures that will facilitate 5G.

Moreover, the ultra-capacity layer requires significant transmission power in order to cover wide areas and overcome the high attenuation at millimetre waves.

This will be achieved by merging three predominant technologies – vacuum electronics, solid-state electronics and photonics – in a unique wireless system, enabled by transmission power at multi Watt level.