Partnership for Broadband Wireless Innovation: Advancing an Increasingly Wire-Free World
As wireless technology becomes more pervasive in our everyday lives, the Partnership for Broadband Wireless Innovation is determined to tackle the challenges and fulfill the promise of wireless.
The partnership includes Villanova, Widener and Temple Universities, BFTP, several large and small companies, and the United States Army, Air Force and Navy. First funded in 2004 with a $600,000, three-year award from the National Science Foundation, the partnership is based at Villanova University’s Center for Advanced Communication.
15 Years of Success
While the Villanova center has been in existence for 15 years and has done quite well, pulling in nearly $3 million in research funding each year, center director and Villanova professor Dr. Moeness Amin saw value in expanding its capabilities. “With BFTP’s help, we have broadened the scope of our research to include the expertise housed in other academic institutions, private businesses, large corporations and federal labs.”
Broadband wireless technology consists of three key interrelated technologies: smart antennas, low-profile antennas and thermal management. Smart antennas will transmit and receive using multiple antennas to significantly increase the system capacity and meet the demand of high data rates. Low-profile antennas create opportunities for efficient low-cost, low-weight designs for portable wireless devices. These antennas can be smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Thermal management innovations are needed to handle heat dissipation for the high power density devices in next generation wireless systems.
“BFTP has played the important catalyst role, activating this dynamic partnership and coordinating the efforts of all the partners,” notes Amin. “They provide much-needed funds to advance research, nurture new ideas and cultivate relationships with small businesses. They do their homework and actively pursue the opportunities that are most likely to materialize.”
The End of Lost Luggage?
While just two years young, the partnership is already tackling some real-world problems with tremendous commercial applications, including developing a technology that could put an end to the number one complaint for airlines-lost luggage.
“Through the partnership, we started a new RFID lab last summer,” says Amin. “We are now working very closely with VerdaSee Solutions to develop novel antenna design for tags and to devise techniques for locating tagged items such as luggage. BFTP inspired the creation of the lab and provided funding, the company donated valuable equipment and we are supporting the effort with technical expertise.”
The research project with Langhorn-based VerdaSee is just one example of more than a dozen projects coming out of the center of which BFTP has played an integral role, including a design and simulation study of an active wideband diplexer for Artisan Laboratories, a New Britain-based producer of microwave-photonic products for the medical imaging, aerospace, radar and communication industries.
Clear Signals
One of the biggest challenges with broadband is signal distortion. The partnership is actively working to develop innovative techniques to make transmissions more resistant to this distortion. And this involves novel signal coding, processing and combining, using multiple antennas on the transmit and on the receive.
“Before you receive a wireless signal, it gets reflected off buildings, bounces from trucks and so on. The larger the bandwidth, the more impairment along the channel and the more potential for data and voice distortions,” says Amin.
Amin says that the major successes of the partnership thus far involve the collaborative work in developing low-profile antenna designs, non-line of sight wireless communications and modeling of thermal activities. He believes the consensus reached through the partnership provides a multi-dimensional approach to problems of common interest. This approach leads to solutions that are optimum, multifaceted and implementable, and ultimately bring more success.
“Commercialization is really the final metric by which we measure the success of this partnership,” Amin says. “Our advances to date would not have happened without the support and encouragement of [BFTP's] Jim Woods and Richard Thompson.”
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