In concert

Mobile phone signal capacity could escalate with better quality video and quicker file downloads if handsets in a local area work together, UK researchers claim.

A team at King’s College London plans to test the hardware and algorithms needed to make a ‘virtual antenna array’ that allows handsets to transmit and receive heavy amounts of data by sharing packets via other mobiles close by. Antennas in mobile handsets today communicate directly with a base station, and so until higher capacity technologies are developed, video messaging and large file downloads can be relatively slow.

Dr Mischa Dohler, leading the upcoming three-year EPSRC project at King’s College’s Centre for Telecommunications Research, said one way to improve capacity is to increase the number of antennas in both the base station and the handset. ‘If you have multiple antennas at the transmitting and receiving ends, that will increase capacity, but you can’t get more than one antenna into each mobile handset,’ he said.