Glasgow University’s James Watt school of engineering will take part in pioneering 6G telecommunications research – working on the design of new smart materials to enable ultrafast, low latency data transfers.
Engineers at the university will collaborate with their counterparts at the Tyndall National Institute’s Wireless Communications Laboratory (WCL) in Ireland on a new initiative, named Active Intelligent Reconfigurable surfaces for 6G wireless COMmunications, abbreviated as AR-COM.
Alongside significant industry collaborators, researchers aim to enhance the design of smart materials known as intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRS), which are anticipated to be pivotal in the rapid 6G wireless networks of the future.
Professor Qammer H. Abbasi, Director of CSI Hub at the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering, is the AR-COMS’s principal investigator.
He said: “Current materials used in wireless communications face significant limitations, especially at the higher frequencies that 6G networks will require. With AR-COM, we’re building on the expertise of the University of Glasgow and the Tyndall Institute with the support of key industry partners to develop truly next-generation technologies.”
Dr Senad Bulja will lead Tyndall National Institute’s contribution to AR-COM. He said: “Resonant tunnelling diodes, which can amplify signals while using very little power, and transition metal oxides which can act as ultra-fast switches have a great deal of potential to help overcome the bottlenecks of current generations of IRS technologies. Together, these technologies will help us create surfaces that not only redirect signals but also boost them with minimal energy consumption, which will help them find use in a wide range of devices in the years to come.”
Professor Muhammad Imran, project co-investigator and the head of the James Watt School of Engineering, said: “Intelligent reconfigurable surfaces will be key to solving the challenges of delivering robust 6G networks and enabling the next generation of wireless applications. Ultrafast, ultra-low latency wireless networks will underpin new forms of communication and sensing that will transform how we interact with each other in the years to come.”
The WCL at Tyndall, located at University College Cork, was established in 2020 by three former experts from Nokia Bell Labs – Holger Claussen, Lester Ho, and Senad Bulja – to amplify Tyndall’s research endeavors in the field of communications.
AR-COM is backed by £1 million in funding from UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) along with €500,000 from Research Ireland.
In addition, researchers from the university have developed an innovative wireless communications antenna that could pave the way for future 6G networks. This digitally coded dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) operates in the 60 GHz millimetre-wave band, a first of its kind in the world.
Dr. Masood Ur Rehman, who led the antenna development, explained: “Our high-frequency intelligent and highly adaptive antenna design could be one of the technological foundation stones of the next generation of mmWave reconfigurable antennas.”
