Credit: M. Hammer/NIST
Engineers Rodney Leonhardt, Alec Weiss and Jeanne Quimby with NIST's SAMURAI, a portable measurement system to support design and repeatable laboratory testing of 5G wireless communications devices with unprecedented accuracy.
Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a flexible, portable measurement system to support design and repeatable laboratory testing of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications devices with unprecedented accuracy across a wide range of signal frequencies and scenarios.
The system is called SAMURAI, short for Synthetic Aperture Measurements of Uncertainty in Angle of Incidence. The system is the first to offer 5G wireless measurements with accuracy that can be traced to fundamental physical standards — a key feature because even tiny errors can produce misleading results. SAMURAI is also small enough to be transported to field tests.
Mobile devices such as cellphones, consumer Wi-Fi devices and public-safety radios now mostly operate at electromagnetic frequencies below 3 gigahertz (GHz) with antennas that radiate equally in all directions. Experts predict 5G technologies could boost data rates a thousandfold by using higher, “millimeter-wave” frequencies above 24 GHz and highly directional, actively changing antenna patterns. Such active antenna arrays help to overcome losses of these higher-frequency signals during transmission. 5G systems also send signals over multiple paths simultaneously — so-called spatial channels — to increase speed and overcome interference.
Many instruments can measure some aspects of directional 5G device and channel performance. But most focus on collecting quick snapshots over a limited frequency range to provide a general overview of a channel, whereas SAMURAI provides a detailed portrait. In addition, many instruments are so physically large that they can distort millimeter-wave signal transmissions and reception.
Described at a samurai measures communications channels precisely
