Sustainable and Adaptive Ultra-High Capacity Micro Base Stations – SAMBAS

As a core component, SAMBAS envisions a novel sustainable mmWave µBS
that relies on harvesting of renewable energy to significantly reduce the non-renewable energy footprint of future critical high data rate ICT applications that require Gbps wireless connectivity at millisecond latency. For this, SAMBAS will combine
(i) hybrid energy harvesting and supercapacitor storage, with (ii) mmWave hardware and firmware with significantly improved energy efficiency. This allows the µBS to reduce its reliance on the (mostly) non-renewable power grid, and even to temporarily run solely on battery power with peak-powering capacity. The µBS becomes the building block of a mesh network revisiting networking principles to achieve less signalling, more decentralization and tighter integration with applications to enable better decision-making for energy-aware operation. Along with energy-aware edge resource allocation, this supports the temporary and flexible deployment of cable-free energy-harvesting mmWave infrastructure, which combines multiple µBSs and the edge cloud into a sustainable infrastructure for critical high data rate ICT applications.

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UGent’s in-band network telemetry (INT) framework, part of the multi-plane architecture, is a software
platform that can be run on top of Wi-Fi COTS devices, Linux systems as well as SDR platforms such as
openwifi, UGent’s Linux-compatible open-source Wi-Fi implementation on top of FPGA. The framework
supports the collection of monitored wireless link information such as RSSI, SNR, data rate used,
contention window, processing delays on each node etc. Framework developments are used internally by
UGent colleagues working on Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) on top of Wi-Fi and by UAntwerp
colleagues working on TSN network management. Further, the solution – in binary form - is also part of a
TSN evaluation kit that is offered to industrial partners that are interested to pursue collaborations on
wireless TSN.
Several follow-up projects with industry partners have been submitted based on the early research done
in SAMBAS. The ENERGETIC project was submitted to the Horizon Europe call CL4-2022-DATA-01-02with
a consortium of 13 partners, including UPoitiers and UAntwerp. It builds on research on sustainable
energy-aware edge computing from SAMBAS (rejected with a score of 12/15). The HEXA-X-II project was
submitted to the Horizon Europe call JU-SNS-2022-STREAM-B-01-05, with a consortium of 44 partners,
including UAntwerp and UGent. It builds on SAMBAS research on low-power mmWave and THz protocols,
as well as time-sensitive wireless networks (approved with a score of 15/15). BME started a national
research project named ELHK Cloud Services, which investigates energy saving for cloud services and 5G
networks.
UEssex has joined a consortium of UK universities (inc. Cambridge, Bristol, UCL, KCL) in a EPSRC Platform
bid to create a next-generation telecommunications inter-university hub for the Southern region of the
UK. Such a Platform grant will enable UEssex to continue researching fibre-6G dual-hub systems featuring
ultra-high data links (wireless and wireline) exploiting available existing dark-fibre capacity to be lit on
demand.
UEssex is part of another project proposal related to a Smart Emerging Technologies Institute (SETI) also
involving the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia (UEA) with industrial participation from BT at
Adastral Park. The SETI institute will provide another forum for UEssex to research into and showcase its
energy-efficient ultra-high-capacity data links using wireless (6G) and fibre technologies for next-generation telecommunications.

Publications :
- Jalal Jalali, Ata Khalili, Atefeh Rezaei, Jeroen Famaey, and Walid Saad, “Power-efficient Antenna Switching and Beamforming Design for Multi-User SWIPT with Non-Linear Energy Harvesting,”
In IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference, 2023.
- Jalal Jalali, Atefeh Rezaei, Ata Khalili, and Jeroen Famaey, “Power efficient Joint Resource Allocation and Decoding Error Probability for Multiuser Downlink MISO with Finite Block Length Codes,” In International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia
Communications, 2022.
- Fayad, M Jha, T Cinkler, J Rak, “Planning a Cost-EffectiveDelay Constrained Passive Optical Network for 5G Fronthaul”, 2022 International Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM), 1-6
- A Fayad, T Cinkler, “Cost-Effective Delay-Constrained Optical Fronthaul Design for 5G and Beyond”, INFOCOMMUNICATIONS JOURNAL 14 (2), 19-27

5G is arguably the most energy-hungry mobile technology yet, with a scalability close to the limit of what the planet and society can environmentally and practically afford. There is already plenty of research towards sustainable and zero-energy end-devices, but huge gains in the energy efficiency and sustainability of the power-hungry network infrastructure behind them are still to be achieved. SAMBAS’ project vision represents a holistic approach in driving a significantly more sustainable B5G/6G wireless communications network, where joint considerations of radical innovations at radio, network, and service levels will lead to critically reduced power needs. SAMBAS contributes towards this goal by developing an innovative sustainable millimetre wave (mmWave) micro base station (µBS) that makes effective use of renewable energy harvesting in combination with extremely energy-efficient hardware, and communications protocols to reduce power consumption >99%. At the networking level, we aim to reduce signalling overhead and energy requirements by an order of magnitude through distributed in-band context dissemination and energy-aware networking. Finally, through joint energy-aware network and cloud resource optimization, a sustainable end-to-end mmWave-based system will be developed. We target B5G performance in terms of latency, ultra-high capacity data rates (>44 Gb/s), reliability, and range, while targeting a 99% reduction in the reliance on non-renewable energy sources. An integrated prototype will be validated via a multi-user indoor interactive virtual reality application, and an outdoors vehicular communications application.