EEMW4FIX

More than one billion homes worldwide still lack a broadband Internet connection. In addition, power consumption related to telecommunication network is constantly increasing following data traffic exponential growth. EEMW4FIX ambition is to offer reliable, high data rate and low-power access to end-users by using advanced antenna architectures for future wireless backhauls and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). To this end, EEMW4FIX aims at developing innovative low-profile, high-gain, and steerable beam smart antenna, using 3D-printed flat lens. EEMW4FIX will address 3 main unresolved challenges needed for mmW FWA: - Drastically improving system energy efficiency of antenna system, RF front-end and beamforming algorithms. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the EEMW4FIX approach can achieve a factor 10 of reduction in power consumption by combining 4 ingredients. The collimating gain provided by lens approach allows to reduce transmit power and increase reception sensitivity proportionally. The Massive MIMO system is realized via a lens antenna and beam space processing, which leads to beamforming algorithms with highly reduced computational complexity (which is normally cubic in the number of antennas). In addition, the number of activated antennas at any time in the feeding array is small compared to a classical antenna array in which all antenna elements are activated, leading to a significant reduction in the number of RF front-ends. Finally, the RF front-end thermal power will be harvested using integrated Peltier cells, further increasing the global system power efficiency. - Design of low-profile highly-directive steerable beam antenna. Most solutions available today exhibit a limited number of switched beam angles, using transmitarray or conventional bulk lenses without any fine beam tuning capability. In EEMW4FIX, a flat full dielectric multifocal lens will be optimized to spatially couple with a steerable phased array to obtain a high and quasi-constant directivity for all steered angles while ensuring extremely low spillover loss. This lens will be monolithically integrated inside a radome by additive manufacturing. Such concept has never been studied. - Extension for dual-band operation. Using multiple frequency bands enables operators to capitalize on the massive bandwidth available in mmW (37.75-40 GHz and 58-64 GHz) for upgrading the last kilometers access network. As a proof-of-concept, the 3D-printed lens of EEMW4FIX antenna will be designed for dual-band operation. Such capabilities are currently not available. EEMW4FIX gathers two academic partners (LEAT and Eurecom), one innovative SME (EV-Technologies) and two large companies (Orange and Thales), all selected for their complementary expertise.