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1. Programmable Radio Environments for Smart Spaces

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3152434.3152456  

   Welkie, Allen; Shangguan, Longfei; Gummeson, Jeremy; Hu, Wenjun; Jamieson, Kyle (November 2017, HotNets-XVI)

   Smart spaces, such as smart homes and smart offices, are common Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios for building automation with networked sensors. In this paper, we suggest a different notion of smart spaces, where the radio environment is programmable to achieve desirable link quality within the space. We envision deploying low-cost devices embedded in the walls of a building to passively reflect or actively transmit radio signals. This is a significant departure from typical approaches to optimizing endpoint radios and individual links to improve performance. In contrast to previous work combating or leveraging per-link multipath fading, we actively reconfigure the multipath propagation. We sketch design and implementation directions for such a programmable radio environment, highlighting the computational and operational challenges our architecture faces. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the efficacy of using passive elements to change the wireless channel, shifting frequency "nulls" by nine Wi-Fi subcarriers, changing the 2 x 2 MIMO channel condition number by 1.5 dB, and attenuating or enhancing signal strength by up to 26 dB. 

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2. UAV Air-to-Ground Channel Characterization for mmWave Systems

   Khawaja, Wahab; Ozdemir, Ozgur; Guvenc, Ismail (September 2017, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) workshop on 5G Millimeter-Wave Channel Measurement, Models, and Systems)

   Communication at mmWave bands carries critical importance for 5G wireless networks. In this paper, we study the characterization of mmWave air-to-ground (AG) channels for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. In particular, we use ray tracing simulations using Remcom Wireless InSite software to study the behavior of AG mmWave bands at two different frequencies: 28 GHz and 60 GHz. Received signal strength (RSS) and root mean square delay spread (RMS-DS) of multipath components (MPCs) are analyzed for different UAV heights considering four different environments: urban, suburban, rural, and over sea. It is observed that the RSS mostly follows the two ray propagation model along the UAV flight path for higher altitudes. This two ray propagation model is affected by the presence of high rise scatterers in urban scenario. Moreover, we present details of a universal serial radio peripheral (USRP) based channel sounder that can be used for AG channel measurements for mmWave (60 GHz) UAV communications. 

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3. Lithium Niobate Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers for high data-rate intrabody communication

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29355-9  

   Pop, Flavius; Herrera, Bernard; Rinaldi, Matteo (April 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract In recent years, there has been an increased interest in continuous monitoring of patients and their Implanted Medical Devices (IMDs) with different wireless technologies such as ultrasounds. This paper demonstrates a high data-rate intrabody communication link based on Lithium Niobate (LN) Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (pMUTs). The properties of the LN allow to activate multiple flexural mode of vibration with only top electrodes. When operating in materials like the human tissue, these modes are merging and forming a large communication bandwidth. Such large bandwidth, up to 400 kHz, allows for a high-data rate communication link for IMDs. Here we demonstrate a full communication link in a tissue phantom with a fabricated LN pMUT array of 225 elements with an area of just 3 by 3 mm square, showing data-rates up to 800 kbits/s, starting from 3.5 cm and going up to 13.5 cm, which covers the vast majority of IMDs. 

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4. Millimeter Wave and Sub-THz Indoor Radio Propagation Channel Measurements, Models, and Comparisons in an Office Environment

   Yunchou Xing, Theodore S. (October 2021, IEEE communications letters)

   Abstract—This letter provides a comparison of indoor radio propagation measurements and corresponding channel statistics at 28, 73, and 140 GHz, based on extensive measurements from 2014-2020 in an indoor office environment. Side-by-side comparisons of propagation characteristics (e.g., large-scale path loss and multipath time dispersion) across a wide range of frequencies from the low millimeter wave band of 28 GHz to the sub-THz band of 140 GHz illustrate the key similarities and differences in indoor wireless channels. The measurements and models show remarkably similar path loss exponents over frequencies in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios, when using a one meter free space reference distance, while the multipath time dispersion becomes smaller at higher frequencies. The 3GPP indoor channel model overestimates the large-scale path loss and has unrealistic large numbers of clusters and multipath components per cluster compared to the measured channel statistics in this letter. Index Terms—mmWave, THz, channel models, multipath time dispersion, 5G, 6G, large-scale path loss, 3GPP InH. 

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5. Clustering Algorithms and Validation Indices for a Wide mmWave Spectrum

   https://doi.org/10.3390/info10090287  

   Antonescu, B.; Tehrani-Moayyed, M.; Basagni, S. (September 2019, Information)

   Radio channel propagation models for the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum are extremely important for planning future 5G wireless communication systems. Transmitted radio signals are received as clusters of multipath rays. Identifying these clusters provides better spatial and temporal characteristics of the mmWave channel. This paper deals with the clustering process and its validation across a wide range of frequencies in the mmWave spectrum below 100 GHz. By way of simulations, we show that in outdoor communication scenarios clustering of received rays is influenced by the frequency of the transmitted signal. This demonstrates the sparse characteristic of the mmWave spectrum (i.e., we obtain a lower number of rays at the receiver for the same urban scenario). We use the well-known k-means clustering algorithm to group arriving rays at the receiver. The accuracy of this partitioning is studied with both cluster validity indices (CVIs) and score fusion techniques. Finally, we analyze how the clustering solution changes with narrower-beam antennas, and we provide a comparison of the cluster characteristics for different types of antennas. 

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