Wireless Future

In episode fifty, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson leave Earth to take a closer look at the new advancements in satellite communications. Constellations with thousands of low-Earth-orbit satellites are now orbiting the sky to deliver fast Internet connectivity to infrastructure, homes, and maybe even directly to 6G mobile phones. How can we reach such distant satellites, and how do the satellite...

The NYU Wireless Workshop this year was a lively scientific event, where the future of wireless technology was debated. Erik G. Larsson was among the invited speakers, and the main theme was “Twenty Years of Massive MIMO: What’s Next?”. In this episode, he discusses the main insights with Emil Björnson. They first dissect the practical challenges that still hinder multi-antenna technology from rea...

Antenna arrays are used everywhere to enhance the wireless signal quality through beamforming and aperture gains. A common practice is to arrange antennas uniformly along a line or in a rectangle, but this is not necessarily the preferred arrangement. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss how the geometry of an antenna array affects the shape of the beams it can transmit and t...

Almost every 6G-related keynote speech at scientific conferences focuses on ISAC: Integrated sensing and communications. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss how sensing and communication technologies have been developed separately in the past but are built on similar yet distinctly different principles. The conversation covers different integration levels, beamforming implem...

One of the first topics covered in this podcast was reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). Five years later, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson return to this topic to reflect on what has happened since then. The conversation covers how these surfaces can improve wave propagation between transmitters and receivers, and identifies the most convincing practical use cases. Core challenges overcome...

“6G should be for the many, not the few” is the final sentence of a recent book by William Webb. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson use this book as the starting point for a conversation on why and how wireless technology can improve its coverage. The end goal is to deliver ubiquitous connectivity, so we can use any wirelessly connected application anywhere at any time. The discuss...

Coverage holes exist in cellular networks despite decades of wireless technology evolution, but new potential solutions are on the horizon. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss network-controlled repeaters, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and half-duplex relays. Network-controlled repeaters have attracted particular attention from 3GPP in recent years; the conversation f...

There are many textbooks to choose between when learning the basics of wireless communications. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss the recent book “Introduction to Multiple Antenna Communications and Reconfigurable Surfaces” that Emil has written together with Özlem Tugfe Demir. The conversation focuses on ten subtopics that are covered by the book and differentiates it fro...

Even if the 6G standardization is just beginning, the last five years of intensive research have illuminated the contours of the next-generation technology. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss the recent paper “6G takes shape” written by leading researchers at UT Austin and Qualcomm. The conversation covers lessons learned from 5G, the potential role of new frequency bands a...

New cellular network deployments are often associated with new frequency bands. 6G will likely use the upper mid-band from 7-24 GHz. It is called the “golden band” since it provides more spectrum than in current 5G networks and features decent propagation conditions. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss the coexistence issues that must be overcome when operating in this band...

Many textbook models of communication systems assume that the transmitter and receiver are synchronized in time, frequency, and phase. Achieving and maintaining such synchronization is an often-overlooked practical challenge. However, the importance of synchronization grows as we plan to use larger antenna arrays and distributed MIMO in 6G. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discus...

Massive bandwidths are available in the sub-terahertz bands, but the coverage of a cellular network exploiting those frequencies will be spotty. The 6GTandem project tries to circumvent this issue by developing a dual-frequency system architecture that jointly uses the sub-6 GHz and sub-THz bands. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson are visited by Dr. Parisa Aghdam, Technical Lead o...

Many topics are studied within the 6G research community, from hardware design to algorithms, protocols, and services. Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson recently attended the ELLIIT 6G Symposium in Lund, Sweden. In this episode, they discuss ten things that they learned from listening to the keynote speeches. The topics span from integrated sensing, positioning, and localization via machine-learni...

We celebrate the three-year anniversary of the podcast with a live recording from the Wireless Future Symposium that was held in September 2023. A panel of experts answered questions that we received on social media. Liesbet Van der Perre (KU Leuven) discusses the future of wireless Internet-of-Things, Fredrik Tufvesson (Lund University) explains new channel properties at higher frequencies, Jakob...

It is easy to get carried away by futuristic 6G visions, but what matters in the end is what technology and services the telecom operators will deploy. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss a new white paper from SK Telecom that describes the lessons learned from 5G and how these experiences can be utilized to make 6G more successful. The paper and conversation cover network e...

The main directions for 6G research have been established and include pushing the communication to higher frequency bands, creating smart radio environments, and removing the conventional cell structure. There are many engineering issues to address on the way to realizing these visions. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss the article “The Road to 6G: Ten Physical Layer Chall...

The speed of wired optical fiber technology is soon reaching 1 million megabits per second, also known as 1 terabit/s. Wireless technology is improving at the same pace but is 10 years behind in speed, thus we can expect to reach 1 terabit/s over wireless during the next decade. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss these expected developments with a focus on the potential use...

Research is carried out to obtain new knowledge, find solutions to pertinent problems, and challenge the researchers’ abilities. Two key aspects of the scientific process are reproducibility and replicability, which sound similar but are distinctly different. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss these principles and their impact on wireless communication research. The convers...

Information theory is the research discipline that establishes the fundamental limits for information transfer, storage, and processing. Major advances in wireless communications have often been a combination of information-theoretic predictions and engineering efforts that turn them into mainstream technology. Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson invited the information-theorist Giuseppe Caire, Prof...

A wave of digitalization is sweeping over the world, but not everything benefits from a transformation from analog to digital methods. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss the fundamentals of analog modulation techniques to pinpoint their key advantages. Particular attention is given to how analog modulation enables over-the-air aggregation of data, which can be used for comp...

Many assumptions must be made when simulating a communication link, including the modulation format, channel coding, multi-antenna transmission scheme, receiver processing, and channel modeling. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson are visited by Jakob Hoydis, Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA, to discuss the fundamentals of link-level simulations. Jakob has led the development...

The research towards 6G is intense and many new technology components are being proposed by academia and industry. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson identify the key selling points of six of these 6G technologies. They discuss the potential for major breakthroughs and what the main challenges are. The episode covers: 1) Semantic communications; 2) Distributed/cell-free Massive MIM...

The reliability of an application is determined by its weakest link, which often is the wireless link. Channel coding and retransmissions are traditionally used to enhance reliability but at the cost of extra latency. 5G promises to enhance both reliability and latency in a new operational mode called ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björn...

Mobile network technology builds on open standards, but it is nevertheless a major effort to implement the required software protocols and interface them with actual hardware. Many algorithmic choices must also be made in the implementation, leading to each vendor having its proprietary solution. The OpenAirInterface Alliance wants to change the game by providing open-source software implementatio...

In the near future, we will be able to deploy new wireless networks without installing new physical infrastructure. The networks will instead be virtualized on shared hardware using the new concept of network slicing. This will enable tailored wireless services for businesses, entertainment, and devices with special demands. In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss why we need mu...