Scalable tiles could advance 5G+ infrastructure

According to research by Gartner, 5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G) is the fastest-growing segment and only significant opportunity for investment growth in the wireless network infrastructure market. Currently 5G+ technologies rely on large antenna arrays, typically bulky and available in limited sizes, making them difficult to transport and expensive to customise.

Now, researchers at Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering claim to have developed a flexible solution for the problem. Their 5G+ enabled smart skins have the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object, researchers said.

Published in Scientific Reports, their study describes the approach which is said to be not only more scalable and customisable than current practices, but features no performance degradation whenever flexed or scaled to a very large number of tiles.

“Typically, there are a lot of smaller wireless network systems working together, but they are not scalable. With the current techniques, you can’t increase, decrease, or direct bandwidth, especially for very large areas,” said Manos Tentzeris, Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Being able to utilise and scale this novel tile-based approach makes this possible.”