NSF Award
1247503
Proposal Summary - Novel Beam Steering Apertures and Waveforms for High Capacity Broadband Wireless Nodes <br/><br/>Intellectual Merit<br/><br/>The demand for broadband wireless has put existing systems to their limits. In not so distant future mobile Gb/s portable and wearable wireless nodes will be required which will necessitate significant improvements in spectral efficiency. This work proposes an integrated research concept which brings together innovations in beam steering antenna arrays and interference immune waveforms and algorithms. To date most of the antennas and arrays that have been developed for portable and wearable wireless applications have fixed broad beams. This makes them very inefficient because much of the radiated radio frequency power is absorbed by the head or the body resulting in wasted battery power. In this work led by USC significantly smaller form factor antenna arrays will be developed by exploiting the steerable parasitic array concept. The dependency of the array gain and angular coverage on array parameters will be studied to develop new design rules. From a systems perspective, efforts have been devoted to maximize spectral efficiency within heterogeneous networking strategies. However, conventional spectrum utilization strategies which are developed for homogeneous networks are being integrated to the heterogeneous networks, which stand as the bottleneck of the heterogeneous network. To break that bottleneck the concept of enhanced partial overlapping domains is proposed by the USF team. For the first time, beam steering approaches at the mobile will be combined with time-frequency utilization considering enhanced partially overlapped domains. A system level testbed will be developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed arrays and waveforms. <br/><br/>Broader Impacts<br/><br/>The broader impact of this work includes its potential for new fundamental knowledge generation in the field of beam steering antenna arrays and interference immune waveforms/algorithms for future high capacity portable/wearable wireless applications. This will have effects on commercial and military communication domains. Immediate tangible outcome will be a system level testbed that will provide results, outcomes, and design guidelines to prospective designers. This research also involves a team from Benedict College, Columbia, SC, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Institution. The Benedict team will conduct research and educational activities that will lead to the development of demonstration modules that will enhance future outreach and recruitment efforts of undergraduate students, high school students, and female and minority studen
