"Emerging fifth generation (5G) mobile communications systems aim to multiply the wireless data transfer capacity by factor of 1000. The radio hardware of the current fourth generation (4G) wireless communications standard is incapable of handling the data rates and thus new radio hardware structures must be developed.
One of the main differences between 4G and 5G is the use of directed communication e.g. ""beam steering"", where the base stations ""direct"" their radio signals towards the user equipment. As the beams aredirected to the particular user, this effectively prevents on user to disturb the communication of the other user, thus reducing inter-user interference, which would otherwise become the limiting factor of communication capacity in very crowded 5G and beyond systems. Beam-forming directs the transmission to desired direction only, thus providing isolation between users in space. Separating user signals in space gives additional degree of freedom for resource allocation, called ""spatial multiplexing"". The core challenge of 5G and beyond radio systems is to implement spatial multiplexing capability in transceiver hardware and crucial for the communication capacity leap as it is the most promising method to increase available spectral communication resources visible for a single user.
Implementing directivity requires use of multiple antennas. e.g. Multi-User-MIMO (Mimo=Multiple In Multiple Out) antenna arrays. More antennas means more and better directivity. However, it is impossible to just increace the number of antennas and multiply the hardware as it would result in enormous pover consumption and multiply the communication capacity requirement between the system central processor and antenna tranceiver units. Finding innovative solutions to this problem is the core task of this project: We aim to develop transceiver units for 5G and beyond beam-steering transceiver arrays and optimize the cost, power consumption and performance of the hardware.
We aim to develop optimized partitioning between the signal processing blocks of beyond 5G antenna array, develop advanced integrated transceiver hardware structures, providing capabilities for agile carrier aggregation and beam-steering, and provide means for digitally assisted interference management. The aim is to find system-level tradeoffs for beam-steering radio structures, optimizing the power consumption, performance and overall cost of the system by utilizing the diversity provided by antenna arrays. Through diversity it is possible to maintain the system performance while individual transceiver units have less stringent performance requirements.
We aim to take full advantage over the semiconductor process scaling (e.g faster circuits with smaller power consumption) and provide new time-based radio architecture implementations that fully support 5G and beyond radio system, delay tuning and synchronization of distributed processing element of an transceiver array. 5G already aims to do a 10-fold leap on every aspect of a communication device, and generations to come will unavoidably obscure the boundaries between communications and computing. However, this cannot happen with the current radio architectures where technologies for communication and computing are very different.
As planned, we ahve developed develop advanced methods for linearization, interference detection and cancellation by merging adaptive DSP with transmitter and receiver design with active interferer and blocker detection and cancellation capabilities. In the future radio standards, it is mandatory to cope with the interference problem in a holistic manner in spatial, temporal and frequency dimensions to prevent the blocking of communication with interference generated by other users. Interferer management part of this project have merged the functions of transceiver array beam-steering, spectrum sensing /blocker detection and removal, and protection of the receiver signal band in frequencey domain."
