Scientists Twist Radio Beams To Send Data At 32 Gigabits Per Second

concertina226 writes Scientists from three international universities have succeeded in twisting radio beams in order to transfer data at the speed of 32 gigabits per second, which is 30 times faster than 4G LTE wireless technology in use today. The researchers, led by Alan Willner, an electrical engineering professor with the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, successfully demonstrated data transmission rates of 32 gigabits per second across 2.5m of free space in a basement laboratory.

Comments

dynamic twisting

[frovingslosh]

Well, there seems to be a lot of information missing, but I'm suspecting that when they talk about twisting the radio signal they don't just mean static circular polarization, they mean that they are dynamically twisting it variable amounts as a way to modulate the data signal onto it. This would be similar to the modulation techniques used back in the last millennium to squeeze far more data down an audio like than the audio bandwidth would imply could be transmitted.

This won't amount to anything...

[Electricity Likes Me]

It's been shown that all these "helical" polarization schemes are degenerate forms of MIMO essentially, and can't achieve speeds better then what MIMO antenna configurations can.

At short distances in quiet environments, you can do a heck of a lot which will never, ever work anywhere but in that experiment.

Same old

[Ol Olsoc]

Seems like once or twice a year, People discover phase encoding. Promises of narrow bandwidth and high transmission rate are so tempting.

And just to really get people excited, you can give the signal another "twist", and another, and another - "HEY! It looks like we can achieve infinite bandwidth!!"

Along with using infinite spectrum and requiring infinite power

This really isn't anything all that new. Hams have been using phase change modes for around 15 years now. Some of these modes, like PSK-31, allow worldwide communications using tiny amounts of power.

But see that "31"? That's the baud rate. It was chosen because that is about the rate that a decent typist can type. Mighty slow.

But it's all scalable, There are much higher rates available. But they all have a price of bandwidth, and the signal needs to be all that much better. Read that as higher transmitting power. There are a few really clever modes, like "MultiPSK, which achieve a higher transmission rate by multiple 2 phase transmissions. They require less power to transmit, but take up some more bandwidth, and the software is more complex because all the separate signals have to be recombined.

The biggest ability of these "OhmaGawd" super transmission systems we hear about a few times a year is to attract dollars for more research.

Final? The system can work as long as they don't try to stuff too much into it. But I doubt in the present day form. Think a big increase in the number of cell towers, an overhaul of wi-fi devices. Note: I haven't seen the bandwidth needed, so am not certain, but this might mean less available channels for wifi devices.

No free lunch here kids.