Today, 6G communications research has neglected the Frequency Range 3 (FR3) band, a critical part of the wireless spectrum. The drawback is partly due to the lack of viable software and hardware platforms for studying the spectral region, which ranges from about 6 to 24 gigahertz. But a new open source wireless research kit is changing that equation. And research conducted using the kit, presented at a major industry conference last week, demonstrates the viability of this spectrum band in future 6G networks.
In fact, it signals a moment of re-evaluation for the telecommunications industry. According to them, the future of high-bandwidth 6G may not focus entirely on difficult millimeter wave-based technologies. Instead, 6G may ultimately leave ample room for more familiar and accessible high-bandwidth microwave spectrum technologies.
The FR3 band is a region of the microwave spectrum just below millimeter wave frequencies (30 to 300 GHz). FR3 is already very popular today in satellite Internet and even military communications. For future 5G and 6G networks to share FR3 bands with existing players, they will need communications networks agile enough to perform regular and fast-response spectrum hopping.
However, spectrum hopping has the inherent physical disadvantages of some parts of the millimeter wave spectrum: limited range, poor penetration, line-of-sight operation, high power requirements, and sensitivity to weather.
The new face of Pi-Radio
Earlier this year, Pi-Radio, a Brooklyn, New York-based startup spun out of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, launched a wireless spectrum hardware and software kit for communications research and development. Pi-Radio’s FR-3 is a software-defined radio system developed specifically for the FR3 band, said company co-founder Sundeep Rangan.
“Software-defined radio is essentially a programmable platform for experimenting with and building on any type of wireless technology,” says Rangan, who is also associate director of NYU Wireless. “Every researcher needs this in the early stages of developing a system.”
For example, the Pi-Radio team presented new findings on inferring the orientation of an FR3 antenna from measurements of a mobile Pi-Radio receiver presented at the IEEE Signal Processing Association’s Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers in Pacific Grove. I did it. October 30, California.
According to Pi-Radio co-founder Marco Mezzavilla, who is also an associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan, the early-stage FR3 research the team presented at Asilomar will allow researchers to “capture (signal) propagation at these frequencies, characterize it, understand it, and , which is the first stepping stone to designing future wireless systems at these frequencies.”
Paolo Testolina, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University’s Wireless Internet of Things Laboratory who was not involved in the recent research effort, said there is a good reason why researchers recently rediscovered FR3. “The current lack of spectrum for telecommunications has led operators and researchers to look for this band, which they believe is possible to coexist with the current spectrum,” he says. “Spectrum sharing will be key in this band.”
Rangan notes that the work on which Pi-Radio is built was published earlier this year on more fundamental aspects of network deployment in the FR3 band, as well as specific implementations of Pi-Radio’s unique frequency hopping research platform for the future. wireless network. (Both papers were published in IEEE journals.)
“If you have frequency hopping, that means you can get a system that is resilient to clogging,” Rangan says. “But if it’s potentially attacked or compromised in some other way, it could actually open up new types of dimensions that we haven’t typically seen in cellular infrastructure.” That said, the frequency hopping that FR3 requires for wireless communications could potentially introduce a layer of anti-hacking that could harden the entire network.
Complementary, not replacement
Pi-Radio TeamHowever, he emphasizes that FR3 will not replace or displace other new sectors of the wireless spectrum. For example, there are millimeter wave 5G deployments already underway today, which will undoubtedly extend range and performance into the 6G future. That said, how FR3 will expand 5G and 6G spectrum use in the future is a chapter not fully written. Whether FR3 as a wireless spectrum band fizzles out, takes off, or finds a comfortable position somewhere in between will depend in part on how research and development is conducted. Now the Pi-Radio team speaks out.
“We are at a tipping point where researchers and academics can really be empowered by the combination of cutting-edge hardware and open source software,” says Mezzavilla. “And this will allow us to test new capabilities for communications in new frequency bands.”
In contrast, millimeter-wave 5G and 6G research has been boosted by the existence of a wide range of millimeter-wave software-defined radio (SDR) systems and other research platforms to date, the team says.
“Companies like Qualcomm, Samsung and Nokia actually had great millimeter wave development platforms,” Rangan says. “But they were in-house. And the effort it took to build an SDR in a university lab was simply insurmountable.”
So it is released cheaplyMezzavilla says open source SDR in the FR3 band could kickstart a whole new wave of 6G research.
“This is just a starting point,” says Mezzavilla. “From now on, we will build new capabilities, including new reference signals, new radio resource control signals and close-range operations. We are shipping these yellow boxes to other academics around the world to test new features and do it quickly before 6G is anywhere near us.”
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