The €2.9million EU project, led by engineers at Lancaster University, is looking to build technologies that can exploit the millimetre wave spectrum beyond 100GHz.
Ultrawave plans to create what it calls an ultra-capacity layer. Not only will this attain data rates of 100Gbit/s, but will also be flexible and easy to deploy. The ultra capacity layer will then feed hundreds of small and pico cells.
Professor Claudio Paoloni, head of Lancaster’s Engineering Department, said: “It is exciting to think that the Ultrawave project could be a major milestone towards solving one of the main obstacles to future 5G networks, which is the ubiquitous wireless distribution of fibre-level high data rates.”
The ultra capacity layer will require ‘significant transmission power’, according to the project and this will be provided by vacuum electronics, solid-state electronics and photonics, with the necessary power levels generated through novel millimetre wave travelling wave tubes.
The consortium includes: Lancaster University; Fibernova; Universitat Politecnica de Valencia; Ferdinand Braun Institute; Goethe University; HFSE; OMMIC; and University of Rome Tor Vergata.