‌The development of future wireless communication standards is aiming to offer an increased data transfer capabilities. For example, 5G is aiming to deliver 1Gb/s data transfer speed (more for local radio networks), 10 times more than current 4G wireless communication systems. The deployment of small cells solutions working with signals in the millimetre wave frequency domain is a strong candidate and significant funding and research work is currently taking place.

The hardware required to deliver this amount of data transfer has to handle signals that exhibit more than 1GHz bandwidth. This hardware consists of transmission and reception architectures based on semiconductor components. In the presence of wideband signals, nonlinear behaviour is exhibited by these semiconductor components which results in corruption of the data and an increase of up to five times in the signal bandwidth. Therefore, linear transmission and reception of signals is essential for reliable communications to occur. Moreover, reducing the power consumption of wireless communication infrastructure goes far beyond the reduction of the deployment and running costs of wireless networks since small cell architecture deployment will massively increase the number of transceiver modules and hence the amount of energy they consume. Therefore it is vital to develop wireless transceiver architecture that is linear, efficient and over wider bandwidths than today, otherwise the deployment of future wireless communication systems is going to face massive sustainability and even feasibility problems.

In the presence of wideband signals the nonlinear behaviour of the transmitter corrupts the signal to be transmitted which results in unwanted corrupted transmitted data and extended frequency occupation. It is possible to compensate for this nonlinear behaviour if the transmitter nonlinearities are identified. This is where the measurement procedure called “vector signal analysis” can be performed. This procedure consists of driving the transmitter with an input signal that has a given bandwidth, and measuring the output signal at a sampling frequency five times the input signal bandwidth. For example, in millimetre wave application, more than 1GHz is likely to be common place as the minimum bandwidth for input signals, hence, the output signal will exhibit 5GHz of bandwidth. In this example, 5GHz sampling speed is required to fully analyse the output signal. This high speed measurement capability does not exist and state of the art (December 2015) instrumentation claims 2GHz observation bandwidth only. Clearly, there is a lack of an essential measurement capability that does not allow the use of inherently nonlinear transmitters in the presence of wideband signals.

This research project aims to push the boundaries of wireless transmitter key capabilities that enable future communication technologies. The proposed work is based on a new idea that has the potential of solving problems in wireless transmitters that are currently holding back the full exploitation of wideband signals in the millimetre-wave domain (frequencies between 30 and 300GHz). This idea consists of a new measurement architecture capable of unprecedented signal analysis bandwidth suitable for millimetre wave wireless communications.‌

The partners include the following:

• Pr. Renato Negra, Chair of High Frequency Electronics, RWTH Aachen University, Germany 

• Dr. Oualid Hammi, Department of Electrical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

• National Instruments Corporation (U.K.) Ltd