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With an eye on future mobile communications standards, a European consortium is working on the next generation of 
antennas for wireless networks.
In Europe, all eyes are currently on the 5G roll-out, yet a European consortium consisting of leading companies and research institutions in the field of mobile communications and communications engineering is working on the technical feasibility of 6G. Austrian companies Technikon Forschungs- und Planungsgesellschaft mbH (as coordinator) and NXP Semiconductors Austria, as well as the Institute of Signal Processing and Speech Communication at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), are substantially involved.
Antennas as wall tile or wallpaper
The consortium wants to develop what they call RadioWeaves technology – a kind of antenna fabric that can be installed in any location of any size – for example, in the form of wall tiles or wallpaper, so entire wall surfaces can act as antenna radiators.
With previous radio standards, such as UMTS, LTE and currently 5G, signals are transmitted via base stations, i.e., antenna infrastructures that are permanently located at a specific position. The denser the network of fixed infrastructure, the higher the throughput, i.e., the amount of data that can be transmitted and processed in a given time window. However, the base stations are a bottleneck. The more wireless devices there are connected to a base station, the more unstable and slower the data transmission. With RadioWeaves technology, that bottleneck would disappear, because instead of a single access point, many access points can be hooked in as needed.
Real-time inventory and grandiose stadium experience
The technology is not needed for the private home, but for industrial and public facilities. It holds opportunities that go far beyond 5G networks. In industrial halls, the technology could provide unprecedented coverage. It would be feasible to locate thousands of objects in real time.
In general, the working group at TU Graz sees great opportunities for radio-based positioning technology. The researchers believe that the RadioWeaves technology can be used to locate goods with an accuracy of ten centimetres.
The research project started in January 2021. By 2024, the consortium aims to develop a first hardware demonstrator to experimentally validate the RadioWeaves technology.