Speaker: John Haine
Title: Academic Research For Maximum Impact In Wireless Communications
Abstract:
The broad scope of wireless communications research is set largely by activities in the industry generally. Is this sensible? How can academic research best anticipate and influence the future?
The wireless industry is driven by standards, which are in turn driven by large corporations to achieve commercial goals that often seem to have little relevance to user needs and even work against efficiency and sustainability. The timescale of standards evolution at the microscale can be extremely short – a feature might be invented, proposed and accepted into a specification in a matter of months. (Not infrequently it may never be actually implemented in practice.) An academic researcher would hardly have completed a literature search in this time! Academic research is unlikely to seriously impact standards in the short term, though it can obviously influence the “climate” in which standards evolve.
But there are significant ways in which fundamental research can positively affect the industry. Obviously new science can find its way into devices and systems, and this often depends on curiosity-driven research that industry finds difficult when constrained by budgets and timescales – quantum devices are an example.
There are also areas where there are severe problems with today’s technologies which have been baked into the system design through a lack of forethought. Often a particular design approach that worked well when systems were simple and only worked on one or two bands gets morphed into byzantine complexity when there are tens of bands and innovations like carrier aggregation and MIMO are added – often for little obvious benefit.
Some of these problems could be alleviated by breakthroughs in device enabling technology. For example, small electrically tuneable high-Q resonators have been desirable for decades but no solution has emerged. New circuit approaches using existing technology might be appropriate needing a creative design approach that breaks from the straitjacket of “standard” techniques.
This seminar will not propose particular new research topics, but rather suggest a loose methodology to identify such “paths less trodden” which could make major contributions to the industry – and create new enterprises.