Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: Programmable Computational Antennas for Sensing and Communications

The performance of wireless communications and sensing is fundamentally determined by the available degrees of freedom in space, frequency, and time. However, as the wireless systems are moving into mmWave 5G and beyond-5G with larger bandwidths (e.g., tens of GHz) combined with larger antenna arrays (e.g., 64 or more antennas at base stations), the number of degrees of freedom becomes so large that it is no longer feasible to access them in a practical manner. In other words, it is challenging to achieve sufficient computational degrees of control in practice to access the available degrees of freedom in higher spectra. This project seeks to address this challenge by developing computational antennas (CompTenna) that can perform programmable analog computations at the antenna in the mmWave and sub-THz bands. CompTenna is best viewed as a new computational unit – when combined with analog/digital computations, CompTenna will significantly expand the degrees of control to enable novel wireless communications and sensing applications on next-generation mobile devices. Through its coherent educational plan, this project will also train the next-generation workforce in the semiconductor and wireless industry by engaging graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students, especially the underrepresented minorities. This project will investigate the foundations of computational antennas (CompTenna) and novel methods to increase network capacity and enable new wireless sensing. It includes three research tasks. (1) CompTenna Foundations: develop CompTenna hardware, its computational model, and simulator. The goal is to synthesize a first-pass physical CompTenna design in a time-efficient manner, based on targeted high-level application needs. (2) Speeding Up the Network Using CompTenna: develop techniques to leverage all the degrees of freedom enabled by the CompTenna in an energy-efficient manner. In particular, this project focuses on how to use CompTenna to create optimal beamforming for single-user and multi-user communications and distributed interference management. (3) Doing More with CompTenna: develop foundations and methods for a layered joint sensing and communications architecture. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.