Challenges and Ideas to Achieve Wireless 100 Gb/s Transmission A short overview of work in progress of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Special Priority Program (SPP)

摘要

Wireless communications is one of the fastest growing technology fields, driving numerous other innovations in electronics. One challenging research area within the wireless field is to achieve a higher transmission speed. Today it is an open question how we can realize a wireless system at a speed of 100 Gb/s or even beyond. If we intend to use such systems in a mobile environment, we can only afford to spend approximately 1-10 pW/bit for the end-to-end communication. This includes all processing and protocol steps. A special priority project within the German research community was set up to investigate new paradigms for achieving the 100 Gb/s wireless transmission goal. Within 11 coordinated projects researchers from all over Germany are looking at several relevant issues ranging from the antennas and RFFrontend, baseband-processing and error correction to protocol processing. One of the big challenges is to find the correct balance between analog and digital signal processing to achieve an extremely high performance at very low energy consumption. Another challenge is to find a good balance between bandwidth and bandwidth efficiency to achieve the 100 Gb/s goal. Finally, protocol processing will need new approaches to decouple the central processor of a computer from the high-end input/output operations. Here we report about work in progress and initial results of selected projects. One interesting finding was that FEC at speed up to 120 GB/s can be realized in a very energy efficient way and with small area/power consumption