Ultrafast 5G mobile broadband thanks to millimeter-wave

Ultrafast 5G mobile broadband thanks tomillimeter-wave band technology25 September 2017

Measurement equipment employed by KeysightTechnologies on this project. Credit: © KeysightTechnologies Denmark Aps / mmMAGIC

The ideal of seamless mobile communicationsposes fundamental challenges to legacy networksthat the new 5G communication networks currentlyunder development need to solve. One suchchallenge is supporting the significant growth oftraffic demands. Next-generation services such asmobile cloud services, gaming, social-networkingapplications and 3-D immersive applicationsrequire massive capacity and higher data ratesthan current 4G networks can sustain.

Researchers at IMDEA Networks in collaborationwith 18 partner organizations have developed anddesigned a new mobile radio access technology fordeployment in mm-wave frequencies, a highlypromising candidate solution for efficient, high-capacity data delivery.

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) systems exploitfrequencies above 10 GHz. Communications atsuch high frequencies pose unique challenges. Onthe one hand, mm-wave systems achieve datarates that are orders of magnitude higher than

current systems operating at lower frequencies. Onthe other hand, mm-wave links experience highvariability in channel quality due to highpropagation loss and unfavorable atmosphericabsorption. Hence, the fundamental question themmMAGIC project aimed to answer is how toefficiently overcome the challenges and benefitfrom the potential gains arising from the use of mm-wave frequencies.

The mmMAGIC solution is a new radio systemconcept for mobile broadband communicationstargeting operation in wide-contiguous bands in mm-wave frequencies. The new radio is a ready-to-usesolution that meets the anticipated end-user andtraffic demands of networked society in the 2020time frame, and addresses the specific challengesof mm-wave bands. In particular, the new radioconcept takes advantage of novel channel modelsproposed in the framework of the project andprovides a new antenna design with hybridbeamforming capabilities. The antenna designaddresses important practical constraints for realdeployment, such as antenna size, cost andcomplexity. The validity of the system design hasbeen corroborated by hardware-in-the-loopexperiments, showing its effectiveness under realchannel conditions and with actual hardware.

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Experiment performed at an airport. Credit: © AaltoUniversity / mmMAGIC

Within the mmMAGIC project, conceptual enablersthat will compose the new mm-wave 5Garchitecture have been identified and assessed. Inaddition to the enablers, radio access network andtransport functionalities for network integration ofmm-wave radio access technology have beenintroduced. Within the former category, a predictivebeam-steering approach has been proposed toimprove performance of mm-wave links and relievepart of the time burden caused by beam trainingprocedures. The approach exploits historyinformation about the users' movement patternsand can also be employed for accurate indoorlocalization systems.

Provided by IMDEA Networks InstituteAPA citation: Ultrafast 5G mobile broadband thanks to millimeter-wave band technology (2017,September 25) retrieved 20 January 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2017-09-ultrafast-5g-mobile-broadband-millimeter-wave.html

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