Although the prototype revealed this year is designed to work at 28 GHz, the Samsung engineers say their approach could be applied to most frequencies between about 3 and 300 GHz. Khan and his colleagues Zhouyue Pi and Jianzhong Zhang filed the first patent describing a millimeter-wave mobile broadband system in 2010. “The transmitter and receiver work together to find the best beam path,” says Farooq Khan, who heads Samsung’s R&D center in Dallas. To connect with one another, a base station and mobile radio would continually sweep their beams to search for the strongest connection, getting around obstructions by taking advantage of reflections. By dynamically varying the signal phase at each antenna, this transceiver generates a beam just 10 degrees wide that it can switch rapidly in any direction, as if it were a hyperactive searchlight. Samsung’s current prototype is a matchbook-size array of 64 antenna elements connected to custom-built signal-processing components. The Intellectual Ventures spin-off Kymeta, for instance, is developing metamaterials-based arrays in an effort to bring high-speed satellite broadband to remote or mobile locations such as airplanes. Such beam-forming arrays, long used for radar and space communications, are now being used in more diverse ways. Samsung’s engineers say their technology can overcome these challenges by using an array of multiple antennas to concentrate radio energy in a narrow, directional beam, thereby increasing gain without upping transmission power. And because a single millimeter-wave antenna has a small aperture, it needs more power to send and receive data than is practical for cellular systems. They also tend to lose more energy than do lower frequencies over long distances, because they are readily absorbed or scattered by gases, rain, and foliage. įor one thing, these waves don’t penetrate solid materials very well. Phones near the 4G tower could connect directly to it. Because the beams wouldn’t overlap, phones could use the same frequencies without interference. Phones at the edge of a 4G cell could use the beams to route signals around obstacles. Meanwhile, 4G networks have just about reached the theoretical limit on how many bits they can squeeze into a given amount of spectrum.ĥg Beam Scheme: Steerable millimeter-wave beams could enable multigigabit mobile connections. But this coveted spectrum is heavily used, making it difficult for operators to acquire more of it. Cellular networks have always occupied bands lower on the spectrum, where carrier waves tens of centimeters long (hundreds of megahertz) pass easily around obstacles and through the air.
Samsung’s technology is appealing because it’s designed to operate at or near “millimeter-wave” frequencies (3 to 300 gigahertz). Although the 5G label is premature, the technology could help pave the road to more-advanced mobile applications and faster data transfers. The South Korea–based electronics giant generated some buzz when it announced a new 5G beam-forming antenna that could send and receive mobile data faster than 1 gigabit per second over distances as great as 2 kilometers. What will these “5G” technologies look like? It’s too early to know for sure, but engineers at Samsung and at New York University say they’re onto a promising solution.
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