Final Report Summary - SEARCHLIGHT (A new communication paradigm for future very high speed wireless networks)
The ERC Consolidator Grant SEARCHLIGHT (https://www.networks.imdea.org/research/projects/searchlight(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) pursued a radical rethinking of wireless architectures for highly scalable ultra-dense millimeter-wave networks. To deal with the extremely dynamic radio environments where channels may appear and disappear over very short time intervals, SEARCHLIGHT uses angle information to rapidly align the directional millimeter-wave antennas. The architecture integrates a location system and learns a map of the radio environment, which allows to rapidly select the most suitable access point and antenna beam pattern and allocate radio resource using predicted location as context information. Access points are deployed ubiquitously to provide continuous connectivity even in face of mobility and blockage and the project developed very low overhead network management mechanisms to cope with the high device density. This design provides key elements for the scalability of future wireless networks.