- Next-generation 6G infrastructure promises high bandwidth, but it requires higher frequencies that are notoriously easily interrupted by a variety of physical obstacles.
- New research seeks to get around this limitation by creating transmitters that can steer a “self-accelerating beam” to bend the signal around these obstacles.
- Although this technology doesn’t solve all of the shortcomings of high-frequency communication, it is currently the best way to maintain a reliable data connection.
With the ever-increasing need for higher bandwidth, telecommunications companies are now hard at work on the future 6G technology (if you believe some foreign governments, the transition is already underway). Like its predecessor 5G, this standard uses higher frequencies to pack more data into a higher bandwidth.
But building such a network isn’t as simple as jacking everything up to terahertz frequencies and calling the bell, because higher frequencies are more susceptible to being blocked by obstacles (walls, buildings, people, etc.) This means that if you have line of sight with your theoretical 6G router, you’re living the data-rich life of the future – but if you decide to move it to another room, you’re back in the stone age.
But a new study from Brown and Rice universities introduces a new technique that could literally get around this 6G limitation. Using “self-accelerating beams” — electromagnetic waves that naturally bend as they travel through space — the team designed a special transmitter that can maintain a connection by effectively “bending” light around an object. Their findings were published in the journal Nature in late March. Communication Engineering.
“This is the world’s first curved data link and marks a significant milestone in realizing the vision of high data rates and high reliability 6G,” study co-author Edward Knightley of Rice University said in a press statement.
To create this curvilinear data link, the team built a transmitter that can manipulate the strength, intensity and timing of its beam, adapting to obstacles by moving the data along pre-designed patterns. If one of these patterns is blocked, it moves to the next, and then the next, keeping the link intact. This allows the terahertz beam to effectively get around obstacles and maintain a connection, but the technology is not perfect. If the signal is completely blocked, such as inside a closed room, the signal has no way to establish a connection and cannot pass through walls like lower frequencies can.
“Bending the beam doesn’t solve all of the potential blockage issues, but it does solve some of them and does so in a better way than other researchers have tried,” Hichem Gherbouka of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who led the research as a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, said in a press statement.
Researchers need to quantify exactly how much these transmitters can bend beams—a feat they have plenty of time to do, as 6G communications is still in its infancy—but similar further advances in electromagnetic manipulation will be necessary for the technology to grow into the backbone of the information age.
Darren lives in Portland, owns cats, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. If you look hard enough, you can find his previous writing on Gizmodo and Paste.
