Connectivity Technology Blog

In May 2024, TheNetworkingChannel hosted a thought-provoking expert panel titled New Frontiers in Wireless Sensing. This session brought together leading researchers from institutions such as MIT, CMU, Microsoft Research Asia, EPFL, IMDEA, UMass and HKUST. Each speaker offered a unique perspective on how wireless sensing is evolving into a foundational capability across domains ranging from healthcare and robotics to ocean and space exploration. The session began by addressing joint communication and sensing with unsynchronised transceivers. Joerg Widmer (IMDEA Networks) demonstrated how millimetre wave systems, despite relying on single RF chains and operating with unsynchronised clocks, can still achieve accurate multipath decomposition by employing cross-correlation techniques. These enable compensation for timing and frequency offsets, which are otherwise significant challenges in multistatic and passive localisation scenarios. Jie Xiong (Microsoft Research Asia and UMass) presente...

Distributed Antenna Systems, commonly known as DAS, play a crucial role in extending mobile connectivity into environments where outdoor signals struggle to reach. From convention centres to hospitals, and from tunnels to stadiums, DAS ensures that users stay connected in areas where mobile coverage would otherwise be poor or non-existent. The main challenge arises from the fact that large buildings often block or degrade cellular signals due to their construction materials. DAS addresses this by redistributing the signal inside the structure through a network of antennas connected to a common source. This significantly improves coverage, capacity and user experience. To explore how DAS works in practice and the differences between types of solutions, we are sharing two insightful videos that break down the fundamentals and practicalities of deploying DAS. The first video, by WilsonPro, offers a straightforward explanation of passive and active DAS. Passive DAS, also referred to as sig...