NYU WIRELESS is an academic research center housed in New York University’s (NYU’s) Brooklyn engineering location. The center collaborates with the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the NYU School of Medicine, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Its mission is to create the next generation of wireless networks. Right now, it has its sights set on 6G technology.
What Are 6G Wireless Networks?
Currently, 5G wireless networks operate on the millimeter band, but 6G will operate on even higher frequencies, up to 1 THz. The new networks are also expected to be cell-less. Right now, mobile network coverage is distributed in cells, which are circular patches of coverage. When you move from one cell to another, your device is handed off to the new cell.
The introduction of 5G networks enhanced these cells. Each cell in a 5G network has a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array to serve people in the cell. Massive MIMO arrays dramatically increase the number of antennas in cells, which improves the performance of wireless networks by adding more access points.
Cell-less networks would instead consist of an intelligent network of access points spread out randomly. A massive network of access points sounds daunting. But we are already laying down the groundwork for the architecture. The Internet of Things (IoT) will create the network. Ted Rappaport, the founding director of NYU WIRELESS, explains, “We’re going to go from 10 or 20 devices today to hundreds of devices around us that we’re communicating with, and that local connectivity is what will drive this cell-less world to evolve.”
Many places are still installing 5G technology, which might make you wonder why we need to begin designing 6G now. Rappaport wrote a paper exploring this question. It turns out that the IoT might actually be part of the problem. He predicts that the increasing demands of new applications, including virtual/augmented reality, autonomous driving, the IoT, and wireless backhaul, will soon outpace the capacity of the 5G network.
Research at NYU WIRELESS
NYU WIRELESS is well-positioned to be a leader in 6G technology. New wireless technologies will build on the technology of 5G networks. The most important technologies in this domain are massive MIMO and millimeter wave technologies. And the center has the leaders of those fields at the helm.
Rappaport is the founding director of the research center. He also drove the research for 5G technology. Specifically, he was instrumental in the development of mm-wave technologies. In 2013, Rappaport, and the students at NYU WIRELESS, tested the viability of using millimeter wave bands in urban environments.
Thomas Marzetta, who is the current director of NYU WIRELESS, led the development of massive MIMO. Marzetta is now focused on investigating new principles to design wireless systems, which he calls “Beyond Massive MIMO.” This research uses channel state information to better exploit spatial multiplexing gains in massive MIMO systems. But the center also continues to push the boundaries of 5G technology.
A key component of the NYU WIRELESS research center is its industry affiliates program. The center currently has 15 industry affiliates, which provide infrastructure, student internships and fellowship opportunities. In exchange, the industry affiliates gain access to the bleeding-edge research at NYU WIRELESS. They are also able to recruit new talent from the pool of students.
Despite the success of the industry affiliates program, both Rappaport and Marzetta would like to see more federal funding for research centers. They believe that creating national centers of excellence will produce more innovative environments and set up the next generation for success. Their vision for NYU WIRELESS is to expose students to a culture of innovation and visionary ideas for wireless networks.
Rappaport believes that if the government does not step in, other countries may take the lead. He explains, “The Federal government has to get together and put money into these centers to allow them to hire talent, attract more faculty, and become comparable to what we see in other countries where huge amounts of funding are going in to pick winners.”
One way the federal government could support centers of excellence is to incentivize industry involvement with a financial multiplier. This would allow industry support to go further and could encourage more domestic support of research. Many of NYU WIRELESS’s industrial affiliates are from outside the U.S.
The Future of 6G Technology
It takes about 10 years to develop new wireless network technologies. This means that by 2030 we may begin to see the new 6G technologies. Rappaport predicts that 6G technology will lead to tremendous gains in the fields of wireless communication, imaging, sensing, localization, and wireless cognition. In his paper “Wireless Communications and Applications Above 100 GHz: Opportunities and Challenges for 6G and Beyond,” Rappaport describes devices that are so advanced they sound like science fiction.
The potential gains in sensing technologies are particularly promising. It will become possible to perform beam scanning to learn more about the environment around you in real time. This technology could create 3D maps and scan for the presence of chemicals around you or allergens in food. Remarkably, it is expected that this technology will be deployable in mobile devices similar in cost to smartphones.
However, the goal of 6G networks is to create what Rappaport calls “wireless cognition,” which would allow a device to complete massive computations remotely. This will support the construction of much lighter devices. Off-loading computation to the network will reduce the need for heavy hardware in a device.
The power of wireless cognition is expected to match the computational power of the human brain, which has about 100 billion neurons that can fire 200 times a second. To match this, computers would require a data rate of 20,000 Tbps. Current affordable computers can only perform about one trillion computations per second. New wireless technology is expected to increase this by 1,000 times. This is still not fast enough, but Rappaport has the ambitious goal of reaching 1 petabit per second.
These are lofty goals and NYU WIRELESS is still small. It has about 15 faculty and 40 students. This means that the center must carefully select which research problems to focus on. The companies it works with, such as Nokia and Samsung, already have large research departments working on many of the issues around wireless networks. To optimize the impact of NYU WIRELESS research, the center focuses on research areas that its industry affiliates are not concentrating on.
Currently, NYU is pushing the boundaries of carrier frequencies. The ultimate goal is, of course, to reach into the terahertz. So far, it is conducting experiments with frequencies as high as 220 GHz, which will free up new ranges in the spectrum. Significant gains into the terahertz frequencies will require reinventing communication hardware. With conventional materials, high-frequency circuits can only reach up to the few-hundred GHz range. To solve this problem, NYU WIRELESS is currently looking into using graphene.
There are still many challenges before we can implement 6G technology—and even more to fully realize the technology’s potential. The students at NYU WIRELESS are well-positioned to make a tremendous impact in the field. Marzetta sums this up nicely, “Wireless communications is a growing and dynamic field that is a real opportunity for the next generation of young engineers.”