IISc researchers designing antennas to empower 6G technology

Such antennas are particularly helpful for applications that require almost instantaneous relay of commands, like driverless cars

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are working on designing antennas that can empower 6G technology, which is instrumental in realising efficient V2X (Vehicle to Everything) communications.

In a recent study, the team, led by Debdeep Sarkar, assistant professor, Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, has shown how self-interference in full-duplex communication antennas can be reduced, and consequently the movement of signals across the communication network can be faster and more bandwidth-efficient.

Instantaneous relay

According to IISc, such full-duplex antennas are particularly helpful for applications that require almost instantaneous relay of commands, like driverless cars.

“Full-duplex antennas consist of a transmitter and a receiver to send and receive radio signals. Traditional radio transceivers are half duplex, which means that they either use signals of different frequencies for sending and receiving or there is a time lag between the signal transmitted and the signal received. This time lag is needed to ensure that there is no interference – the signals going back and forth should not cross paths, similar to two people talking to each other at the same time, without pausing to listen to the other. But this also compromises the efficiency and speed of signal transfer,” said IISc.

It further said that in order to transmit data much faster and more efficiently, full-duplex systems are required, where both the transmitter and receiver can operate signals of the same frequency simultaneously. For such systems, eliminating self-interference is key. This is what Mr. Sarkar and his IoE-IISc postdoctoral fellow Jogesh Chandra Dash, have been working on for the past few years.

Optimising device

In the immediate future, the team plans to optimise their device so that it can entirely remove passive interference, and reduce the overall size of the antenna. Then, it can easily be fixed onto a vehicle where it can transmit and receive data at very high speeds, bringing driverless operation as well as 6G mobile connectivity closer to reality.