(Credit: Flickr @ Alan Levine http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/)
Carnegie Mellon University’s Jeyanandh Paramesh and Pulkit Grover are developing extremely high frequency (EHF) wireless tools and systems designed to stem the energy use of wireless data traffic.
With a four-year, $800,000 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering are working to establish new information theory, concepts and technological solutions to keep pace with the explosion in wireless traffic, which is projected to outpace “Moore’s Law,” the trend that predicts that transistor capacity will double every 18 months.
“We plan to design and build prototype systems that are able to respond and adapt dynamically to the environment in order to operate with minimal energy use in changing environments,” Paramesh said.
These systems operate in the so-called “millimeter-wave” frequency bands (e.g., 60 GHz) where large bandwidth is available. But the starkly different nature of radio wave propagation (compared to the sub 5 gigahertz bands where current radios operate) forces a conceptual and technological re-think of how extremely high frequency wireless links are designed, the researchers said.
Extremely high frequency is the highest radio frequency band, a form of electromagnetic radiation. EHF runs the range of frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz, above which electromagnetic radiation is considered to be low (or far) infrared light, also referred to as terahertz radiation. Radio waves in this band have wavelengths from ten to one millimetre, giving it the name millimetre band or millimetre wave, sometimes abbreviated MMW or mmW.The professors and their research team report that energy consumption of mobile devices has become a bottleneck, and the energy overhead of any new spectrum access remains unclear. And because today’s archaic systems are designed with rigid, fixed parameters, there is no room for energy efficiency.
But Paramesh and Grover aim to design a system that will be adaptable and efficient enough to rein in energy use by 50 percent, and perhaps much more.
“Part of our novelty lies in designing systems that reduce the energy it takes to send a message together with the energy it takes to decipher that same message,” Grover said. “These two problems have traditionally been addressed in an isolated manner, leading to huge inefficiencies in energy usage by existing systems.”
Grover also is developing new energy-efficient protocols and circuits that can reduce energy consumption by including the right pattern of “redundancy” for correcting errors in communication links of big data centers.
