By Rachel Atkinson
Hello...you...now...what?
A team of BYU electrical engineers has found a solution for bad cell phone reception and reliability and voice-quality concerns of cell phone users across the country.
Michael Jensen, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, worked with post-doctoral researchers Thomas Svantesson and Jon Wallace to build an antenna that transmits twice as much information over a single frequency.
'There are lots of people working on multi-antenna communication,' Jensen said. 'But what we specifically did was a theory to show how we could use radio wave properties to make one antenna with two connection points on it, so it acts like two antennas. It makes it a lot easier for compact devices like cell phones.'
He said two antennas allow devices to receive two different radio waves.
'The idea is that out there at a base station I am going to take your voice, and I am going to rip your voice in two pieces,' Jensen said. 'I am going to send one in one direction, and the other in a different direction. When I get to my cell phone, I am going to pick up those two signals and put them back together, and the results are going to be that without using any more frequency bandwidth, I am going to get better quality of your voice.'
Jensen said companies like AT&T and Verizon Wireless pay to use frequency bandwidth to generate radio signals that cell phones translate into speech. Providers want to get as much information through those frequencies as possible.
Wallace said the new technology will benefit both the industry and cell phone users. 'It is expensive to license different frequencies, and by using this technology, providers can send double the information without buying new bandwidth. They can support twice the number of users or provide twice the quality,' Wallace said.
Jensen said although cell phone providers may offer superior voice quality for a higher price, most likely they will use it to accommodate more users in densely populated areas. They will be able to provide more services to people with the same number of base stations.
'In places like Japan where they have high population densities, they are clamoring for this kind of technology, much more than most places in the U.S.,' he said.
To offer these services, providers will need to add equipment to their base stations and cell phones, changing the antennas.
Wallace said one thing that makes their department and research different is that it isn''t purely theoretical. They have actually built the real application systems that perform advanced algorithms and can show that they work.
The research titled, 'Analysis of Electromagnetic Field Polarizations in Multiantenna Systems,' was published in 'Transactions on Wireless Communications,' an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal. Jensen said they have been working on this research for six years and have presented this technology in multiple conferences.
Jensen noted a variety of different projects related to multi-antenna communication, and said the team plans to develop ways to build compact antennas that will allow more cell phone capabilities. They also plan to further their research and pursue the technology to improve the data rate or quality without consuming more bandwidth.