NYU WIRELESS Ph.D. students Russell Ford and George MacCartney have demonstrated the center’s first LTE-like transmissions at millimeter wave frequencies.  Millimeter wave (mmW) bands between 30 and 300 GHz are a new frontier for wireless communications that offer the possibilities of orders of magnitude more spectrum than current cellular and WiFi allocations.  These bands have been the focus of considerable interest recently for Beyond 4G and 5G cellular systems and are one of the key research areas of NYU WIRELESS.

In collaboration with National Instruments, an NYU WIRELESS industrial affiliate,Profs. Rangan and Rappaport and their students have been developing a high-performance software-defined radio platform that can provide one of the first systems for experimentation in 4G and 5G cellular systems in a university research lab.  Using this platform, the students were able to demonstrate end-to-end transmission of high-definition video stream in the 60 GHz range.  The system included modules for synchronization, equalization and turbo decoding, as well as a MAC and upper layer protocol functionality.  The successful transmission on this system is a significant first step for NYU WIRELESS to make mmWave systems a reality!