ECE Research Group Dramatically Reduces the Hardware and Power Requirements of 5G networks
Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and diversified mobile applications, the data traffic in wireless networks keeps growing at an exponential rate. The upcoming 5G network needs to achieve substantially larger capacity to meet such strong demands. Unfortunately, conventional techniques have reached their limits. Raising carrier frequencies to the millimeter wave (mm-wave) band will boost the network capacity by orders of magnitude, but formidable hardware and algorithm design challenges must be overcome. Xianghao YU, a PhD student at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his supervisors Profs. Jun Zhang and Khaled Ben Letaief have developed an innovative hardware structure that enjoys much lower complexity and power consumption than previous proposals by automatically adapting to channel conditions. They describe it in their paper entitled "Hybrid precoding in millimeter wave systems: How many phase shifters are needed?” Experts from around the world gathered together to recognize their groundbreaking work in Singapore on 6 December 2017, by awarding it the Best Paper Award at this year’s flagship conference in the field of communications, GLOBECOM 2017.
