These items are all from ACM Tech News, an e-mail newsletter that I get from the Association of Computing Machinery. These may all be computing-related, but they are also the future of RF and microwave.…Dan
U.S. Pumps $400 Million Into Next-Generation Wireless Research
IDG News Service (07/15/16) Grant Gross
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will invest more than $400 million over the next seven years to fund next-generation wireless research to enable super-fast mobile service. U.S. officials expect the investments, announced last week, will accelerate the transition to next-generation 5G mobile service, potentially offering speeds of 10 Gbps and enabling a swift expansion of the Internet of things (IoT). John Holdren, assistant to President Barack Obama for science and technology, says these services will make self-driving cars, an “always on” IoT, smart cities, new virtual reality offerings, and video to assist police, firefighters, and emergency medical responders a reality. The NSF grants include $50 million as part of an alliance with more than 20 mobile companies and trade groups to deploy advanced wireless testing sites in four U.S. cities, which will feature the rollout of small cells to increase signals of high-band, millimeter-wave spectrum. The announcement follows a vote by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to unlock almost 11 GHz of high-band spectrum to 5G and IoT services. NSF also will invest $350 million over the next seven years on basic research and testing of next-generation wireless technologies. “History has shown us that when we make sustained federal investments in fundamental academic research and in public-private partnerships…we as a nation reap the benefits,” Holdren says.
Breakthrough in Powering Wireless Sensors
Australian National University (07/13/16)
Australian National University (ANU) researchers are making progress toward harvesting renewable or ambient energy from mobile phone base stations to power battery-operated wireless sensors used in a range of industries. The researchers were able to accurately model how much energy it takes to sense and transfer information by wireless sensors, and they are working on further ways to analyze the problem. “A major problem hindering the widespread deployment of wireless sensor networks is the need to periodically replace batteries,” says ANU professor Salman Durrani. The researchers found it was feasible to replace batteries with energy harvested from solar or ambient radio frequency sources such as communication towers or other mobile phone base stations, with communication delays limited to less than a few hundred milliseconds. “If we can use energy harvesting to solve the battery replacement problem for wireless sensors, we can implement long-lasting monitoring devices for health, agriculture, mining, wildlife, and critical national infrastructure, which will improve the quality of life,” Durrani says.
Extending Battery Life for Mobile Devices
University of Massachusetts Amherst (08/26/16)
Mobile devices will be able to leverage battery power in larger nearby devices for communication using new radio technology developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst). A paper on the new technology was presented last week at the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM 2016) conference in Brazil. “We take for granted the ability to offload storage and computation from our relatively limited personal computers to the resource-rich cloud,” says UMass Amherst professor Deepak Ganesan. “In the same vein, it makes sense that devices should also be able to offload how much power they consume for communication to devices that have more energy.” The team enabled Bluetooth to operate asymmetrically like radio-frequency identification (RFID). Dubbed Braidio for “braid of radios,” the technology operates like a standard Bluetooth radio when a device has sufficient energy, but runs like RFID when energy is low, offloading energy use to a device with a larger battery when needed. The team developed a prototype radio that could help extend the life of batteries in small, mass-market mobile devices such as fitness trackers and smartwatches. Ganesan says battery life could be extended hundreds of times in some cases, and “energy offload” techniques could lead to smaller and lighter devices in the future.
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