First Curved Data Link Avoids Key Challenges for 6G Wireless

Next-generation wireless signals will likely be in the form of targeted, directional beams rather than radiated indiscriminately from base stations as they are today. However, physical interference, such as objects or people passing nearby, can still disrupt the signal, posing a literal roadblock to the implementation of ultrafast mmWave and sub-Terahertz wireless networks.

But researchers from Rice and Brown Universities have shown that curved beams loaded with data can establish a link between a base station and a user, effectively avoiding intervening obstacles.

In published studies, Communication EngineeringResearchers have demonstrated sub-terahertz beams that follow curved trajectories, an achievement that could revolutionize wireless communications by making the future of wireless data networks operating at sub-terahertz frequencies more feasible.

“This is the world’s first curved wireless data link and marks an important milestone in realizing the vision of high data rates and high reliability 6G,” said Edward Knightley, Sheafo Lindsay Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of computer science at Rice University.

“Today’s low-frequency Wi-Fi appears to travel in all directions, like a radio broadcast, but in the future, to achieve higher frequencies and faster data rates, the traveling beam must become directional.”

Currently, cellular networks and Wi-Fi systems use low-frequency gigahertz waves to transmit data, but future technologies will use sub-terahertz waves, which will have 100 times the data capacity.

“We want to get more data per second,” said Daniel Mittelman, a professor of engineering at Brown University and lead author of the study. “To do that, we need more bandwidth, and traditional frequency bands just don’t provide that bandwidth.”

As a starting point, the researchers investigated self-accelerating beams — specially constructed electromagnetic waves that curve as they travel through space. By designing transmitters that cooperatively control the intensity and frequency of the emitted waves, the researchers were able to ensure that data was transmitted along a curved, parabolic trajectory.

“Bending the beam doesn’t solve all of the potential occlusion problems, but it does solve some of them and does so in a way that’s better than other methods have attempted,” said Hichem Gherbouka, who led the research as a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and is now an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The researchers verified their findings through extensive simulations and experiments that maintained a communications link with high reliability and integrity while avoiding obstacles.

The researchers say they hope that using these curved beams will enable new applications such as mobile immersive augmented reality, where high data rates must be sustained regardless of user movement or nearby obstacles.