Mandate-driven networking eco-system : a paradigm shift in end-to-end communications

The wireless industry is driven by key stakeholders that follow a holistic approach of "one-system-fits-all" that leads to moving network functionality of meeting stringent End-to-End (E2E) communication requirements towards the core and cloud infrastructures. This trend is limiting smaller and new players for bringing in new and novel solutions. For meeting these E2E requirements, tenants and end-users need to be active players for bringing their needs and innovations. Driving E2E communication not only in terms of quality of service (QoS) but also overall carbon footprint and spectrum efficiency from one specific community may lead to undesirable simplifications and a higher level of abstraction of other network segments may lead to sub-optimal operations. Based on this, the paper presents a paradigm shift that will enlarge the role of wireless innovation at academia, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME)'s, industries and start-ups while taking into account decentralized mandate-driven intelligence in E2E communications

Scalable conformal array for multi-gigabit body centric wireless communication

In this work a conceptual design of a conformal antenna array is presented for a millimeter-wave antenna system, optimized for low-cost mass production in PCB technology. The conformal array is constituted by four cube faces with two antennas realized on each face. A printed circuit board (PCB) laminate material was chosen for developing this integrated 60 GHz antenna solution. The beamforming capabilities of the 1 × 8 antenna array were validated using similar array topology but at frequency of 17.2 GHz. The proposed array enables the formation of a steerable high gain beam, significantly compensating the channel loss or shadowing in body area network (BAN), thus offering more robust, higher speed performance. The array topology is easily scalable and the antenna gain up till 12.2 dB is reachable. On one side such high gain combined with an agile beam steering is a significant power saving solution for RF front-end. On the other side a use of 60 GHz frequency band makes the antenna array extremely small and thus easily embeddable into wearable medical or commercial devices