Spatial Modulation and reconfigurable antenna to provide high rate connectivity to mobile and energy autonomous sensors – SpatialModulation

1- Objectives: to design a new air interface for Mobile IoT to be imbedded in future baseline air interfaces for 5G mobile networks and WLAN

Our project aims at designing a new air interface for horizon 2020 for high data rate mobile Internet of Things (IoT). It shall support, for instance, new IoT applications such as mobile connected autonomous cameras. The additional cost and energy consumption of the object, due to the connectivity, should remain as low as possible.
Compared to the future baseline air interfaces for the mobile networks (5G) and the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), this new interface should:
support the same mobility with small, low cost and robust devices;
achieve similar or slightly lower rate on the device-to-network direction especially;
achieve lower energy consumption due to Radio Frequency part;
be more sober in terms of radiations.
This new interface shall also be embedded in the future baseline interfaces for mobile netwroks (5G) and WLAN standards. It will therefore be compatible with Multi-Carrier Modulations. Indeed, it shall use a pre-defined set of sub-carriers of the future baseline air interfaces for 5G and WLAN without disturbing communications supported by the other sub-carriers of the same air interfaces.

2- Scientifical approach and technical challenges: spatial modulation and tunable locally resonant antennas

To this aim, we will design a new wireless Transmitter/Receiver to be installed on the connected mobile objects, and we will jointly optimize the use of two disruptive techniques: Spatial Modulation Multiple Input and Multiple Output (SM-MIMO) and Tunable Locally Resonnant Antennas (TLRA).
On the one hand, compared to a conventional MIMO system, SM-MIMO theoretically reduces the cost in complexity and energy of the object, per transmit data bit per second, by using a Single Radio Frequency chain instead of several.
On the other hand, TLRA theoretically increases SM-MIMO performance thanks to its larger flexibility.
One can therefore hope that by jointly optimizing both techniques, the goals of the projects will be met.

3- Work program: from design to proof of concept

The first main output of the project will be a material proof of concept with over-the-air data transmission and using TLRA antennas will be issued. The second main output of the project will be a set of innovative cross PHY-Antenna schemes relying on SM-MIMO and TRLA, to address the challenging requirements of mobile networks: high mobility, Frequency Division Duplex mode and compatibility with Multi-Carrier based waveforms.
Metrics such as the cost in energy, complexity and radiation per transmitted bit per second will be assessed.

4- Consortium: mainly academics, leaded by industrials, and experts in cross PHY-Antenna design otpiimsation

The consortium is composed of 2 companies (Orange and TRCOM) and 4 academic institutions (Langevin Institute, IETR INSA of Rennes, Telecom Bretagne, Supélec). Orange will lead the project. Supélec is leading the global research on SM-MIMO topic. The other partners are producing together a proof of concept of joint Time Reversal and Micro structured antennas in the ANR TRIMARAN project (ending in June 2014), and are studying a basic Receive Spatial Modulation scheme. This consortium has therefore the following advantages to achieve the project proposal objectives: there is a strong complementary between partners; there is an opportunity for savings in material and FPGA development resources by reusing TRIMARAN project platforms, to address new challenges; the consortium has experience on joint PHY-Antennas design for small equipments.