This project will improve the efficiency and performance of wireless systems that use Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) configurations. MIMO systems use multiple antennas to multiply the amount of data transmitted over a given channel using the same spectral footprint as non-MIMO systems. However, there is a large capability gap in detection techniques for MIMO systems between the state of the art in research and commercial implementations. While much research has been focused on reducing complexity for optimal or near-optimal schemes, it is still common practice in industry to use simple techniques (such as linear equalization) that are generally significantly less efficient. This situation sits in stark contrast to the reality that users are demanding increasingly higher data rates while service providers are struggling to work within the limited radio spectrum they have available. While theoretical methods exist to increase data rates without increasing bandwidth, commercialization of these techniques will require addressing both significant theoretical challenges and severe practical implementation hurdles. This team plans to leverage promising preliminary results from research on wireless communication theory and hardware design towards the development and commercialization of significantly more efficient commercial-grade detectors for various MIMO systems.
If successful, this project will directly result in the commercialization of advanced equalization techniques for MIMO systems. As these advances are compatible with existing systems, the significant gains in range, power, and spectral efficiency can be realized without changes to existing infrastructure. This multi-disciplinary project will provide a competent framework to understand interrelationship among the hardware and software implementations. Such a framework can be used to focus future theoretical communications research more effectively on implementable systems that can benefit consumer, government, and industrial sectors. This project will also establish a conduit for commercialization of further advances in communications and enhance the research partnership between the investigators and the researchers in the wireless communication industry facilitating application of scientific discoveries to the application domains.
The I-Corps program is designed to help researchers and "academics" to learn how to transition technology from the lab into peoples lives via commercialization of that technology. It accomplishes that by training professors, students, and entrepreneurial mentors in an intensive course that involves building a business model and "getting out of the lab" to test and refine that model through scores of interviews with potential customers, users, and even partners. For this grant, we evaluated the commercialization potential of a technology that enables efficient use of multiple (3+) antennas for increasing data throughput and reliability in wireless networks (such as cellular data networks) without consuming additional radio bandwidth. In summary, we found that the technology is of interest to device manufacturers, service providers, and infrastructure providers. The technology (a form of MIMO - multiple-input multiple-output system) will facilitate growth in future generation wireless networks and enable such networks to overcome current limitations due to the lack of available radio bandwidth. Some applications of this technology include wireless backhaul (conveying information from local, mini cell towers to network access points), in-home media dissemination, improved WiFi performance, and cellular networks using LTE-A and beyond. The technology works by simultaneously transmitting multiple data streams over the same band, then unscrambling the received data in a very fast, accurate, and efficient manner to recover each of the transmitted data streams.
