David Hunt
Professor Chen
ECE 591: Introduction to Next Gen Wireless
21 April 2022
Final Mini Assignment
1. Which technology/network/application introduced in this class attracts you the most?
The technology that attracted me the most was mmWave radar and its applications. Prior to
joining this class, I knew a little bit about radar systems, but not very much. The
introductory material provided on FMCW radar was incredibly interesting to me and helped
me to actually understand how radars observe the world. For example, learning how a radar
measures velocity using the phase shift of signals between chirps was particularly
interesting, especially since I had previously thought that radars utilized the doppler shift. In
addition to learning how radars worked, I was also attracted to the material that covered
various applications. In particular, I was very interested in the gesture recognition, heart
rate and breathing rate, and material sensing applications which I hadn’t realized radar was
being used for. The material presented on these topics was fascinating and I would like to
explore these uses in the future. I was able to explore gesture recognition for my course
project, and I’m looking forward to potentially exploring drone recognition in the future.
2. What is one technology/network/application that does not yet exist but you would love to
see wireless and mobile networks support in the future?
I would really like to see wireless and mobile networks support environment sensing more
in the future. Currently, technologies like radar which are used to sense and observe the
world are separate from the technologies used in wireless and mobile networks. However,
it would be particularly interesting to explore whether the same technologies used for
wireless and mobile networks could also be used to sense and observe the world. This could
be done in a few different ways. The simplest way would probably be determining the
location of each device that is connected to a particular terminal. For example, would it be
possible to evaluate how many cars are using a particular road way by determining the
location of user’s phones as they. A more interesting situation would be whether or not 5G
or Wi-Fi terminals could be used to sense objects around them when used in applications
like autonomous cars. At the current moment, cars are equipped with separate radar units
and there isn’t any technology in use for cars to communicate with each other or other
users. In the future, it could be very powerful if cars could use 5g terminals to communicate
with each other and sense things all using the same waveform and hardware. This is a
problem that would be incredibly difficult to solve as FMCW is not capable of transmitting
data and most communication waveforms haven’t yet been studied for their ability to
transmit data and sense the world around them. Additionally, potential interference in a
crowded environment would also be challenging as well. All of these challenges would have
to be overcome, but the potential benefits to society could be very big as well.
3. Do you think that we in 5G yet (yes/no and why) and what is your grand vision of 6G?
I believe that we are in 5G at this point for several reasons. To start, 5G NG is a completely
different technology compared to 4G LTE. It has a different frame structure, operates at
different frequency bands, and has a different channel/cell architecture. In class, we discussed
how each new “generation” of wireless involved typically involves a major upgrade in the
physical implementation (ex: going from analog to digital) and significantly faster data speeds.
In addition to the physical changes implemented in 5G NR, it also features an order of
magnitude improvement for latency, peak data rates, and user density. While these are only a
few of the changes and improvements, I feel that these are sufficient to call 5G NR a new
generation of wireless.
In terms of 6G, I have several things that I would like to see. First, I think that it is important for
6G to achieve fast wireless speeds in rural areas. 5G has made great strides in terms of enabling
more people in urban and crowded environments to have even faster data speeds. However, as
was discussed in class, there are still large parts of the country that don’t have very good
internet speeds. One of the big goals that I would like to see 6G achieve is good quality
coverage in rural areas. Maybe the 6G infrastructure is able to take advantage of satellite
networks like star link and remote terminals to provide coverage, or maybe there will be
something else. However, I think that 6G should seek to bring wireless to remote communities.
Secondly, I think that 6G will really start to take advantage of Central Units, Distributed Units,
and Remote Radio Units. One of the advantages of moving towards 5G is that the most of the
processing doesn’t have to be done on complex and expensive baseband processing units.
However, it seems like there is a lot of work to go. With companies like Microsoft, google, and
amazon all starting to open large cloud computing processing centers, I think that it is only a
matter of time before they get into the communication processing sectors. One of the things
that 6G will have to figure out though is how to send massive amounts of unprocessed
communications data to these data centers. I think that 5G will figure some of this out, but I
think that 6G will really take advantage of this technology. If these companies are able to
implement central units and distributed units in the cloud, it would greatly simplify the design
of the actual terminals and also make software/hardware upgrades much easier and effective.
Third, I would like 6G to be able to implement sensing capabilities. Whether it is sensing how
many people are in a building, measuring the flow of traffic on a highway, or sensing the
vehicles around an autonomous car, I think that this is could be another technological leap that
could really benefit society. This may require new waveforms that are better suited for sensing
or new processing techniques that can be used to sense objects, but it would be really cool if
we could implement this. Finally, I would like to see 6G be used in vehicles to communicate
amongst each other. Whether it is allowing drones in a swarm to communicate with each other
or cars on the road to communicate with each other, I feel that this would also be a very helpful
technology as well. In reality, its hard to say what 6G will really achieve, but hopefully it
achieves some of the things that I’ve set out in the paragraph above.