Research Overview

The upper mid-band — roughly from 7 to 24 GHz — has attracted considerable recent interest for new cellular services. This frequency range has vastly more spectrum than the highly congested bands below 7 GHz while offering more favorable propagation and coverage than the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies. Realizing the full potential of these bands, however, will require fundamental changes to the design of cellular systems. Most importantly, the spectrum will likely need to be shared with incumbents including communication satellites, military RADAR, and radio astronomy. Also, due to the wide bandwidth, directional nature of transmission, and intermittent occupancy of incumbents, cellular systems will need to be agile to sense and intelligently use large spatial and bandwidth degrees of freedom.

This project addresses several important areas for the development of systems in these bands including:

• Channel measurements and modeling for assessing capacity and coverage of wideband systems in these bands.
• Protocols and algorithms for dynamic spectrum sharing and co-existence with a particular focus cellular satellite-satellite coordination.
• Circuits and antennas for multi-band RF spectrally agile transceivers
• Testing methods for integration into O-RAN