World goes wireless
by Linda Hein
Researchers
at UniSA’s Institute for Telecommunications Research (ITR) have
imagined a wireless world without day long downloads or burdensome
cables, and they’re generating the technology to make it happen.
The Glimmr (Gigabit Low-Cost Integrated Millimetre-Wave Radio) project, in partnership with Macquarie and Adelaide Universities, has proven the viability of a new and as yet untapped radio frequency band to increase the speed and capacity of wireless data transfer.
Professor of Communication and Signal Processing Bill Cowley is among the team of world-leading researchers looking at a way to facilitate high speed data downloads to wireless devices like laptops and iPods, and potentially cable-free links between the home DVD player and high-definition TV.
"The world is going wireless in a very big way," Prof Cowley said.
"Now you see people sitting in coffee lounges and airports using various portable devices and they increasingly want to watch video media on these kinds of devices.
"Every time we make a wireless connection, we’re using the radio spectrum and basically we’re running out of bandwidth due to such high uptake of wireless technologies," he said.
Applications that need a lot of data, like video and movies, also have to move these large amounts of data in a relatively small time, which is where the new millimetre wave technology comes in.
"One way to get these very high data rates is to go to an area of the radio spectrum called the millimetre wave," Prof Cowley said.
"Millimetre waves are a fairly new thing in electronic communications and this project is one of the first in the world to use such technology.
"The frequencies are high, higher than we have normally employed, so there’s more free spectrum. In this particular case we’re using this new band to make some really high speed radio communications happen."
This means that using an electronic chip developed as part of the project, a wireless laptop system could operate 20 times faster than current speeds - and up to 100 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
The chip could also establish a wireless connection between a laptop or desktop computer and a data projector, or even a screen within the same room, and link a DVD player with a HD TV – with no wires or cables.
The ITR team has focused on modem design, system simulation and chip testing to produce a realistic model of how the final system will perform.
"Most of what we’re is doing is computer simulation, which basically lets you design the system without the real hardware in mathematical models and play with the way the signals operate so you can measure the performance," Prof Cowley said.
"We find out if it will work over certain distances, what speeds it will achieve over those distances and even produce pictures of the waves and how the signals bounce and reflect around a room.
‘We’ve also been testing chips produced by Macquarie University, which means we’ve also been transmitting actual signals around one of the labs and measuring what the response is like from one part of an office to another, to demonstrate that the prototype chip technology actually works."
Prof Cowley said the next move is to build a proof of concept demonstrator which will take the technology another step closer to commercialisation.
"The demand for broadband mobile communications is growing so rapidly there’s no doubt in my mind that this type of technology will be used, so it will be interesting to see how it unfolds."