SBIR Phase II: Interference Mitigation for Broadband Wireless Backhaul Systems

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to enable wireless industry carriers and equipment providers with an affordable technology solution to meet the continuing explosive societal/customer demands for data access. The telecommunication market sector has been increasingly consolidating to Asia and Europe where foreign governments are making strategic investments to encourage work in their respective countries. In a long-term, the proposed interference elimination technology can lead to increased investment in the telecom equipment sector and efficient use of the finite radio frequency (RF) spectrum in the United States. The expected technical and commercial outcome from the project is an active interference mitigation capability with product features including a significantly improved quality of service, simplified network equipment design and installation, and reduced requirements for many components such as antenna and filters. This in turn will reduce the overall cost per data link, as well as reducing the size, weight, and power requirements of the system. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project addresses the critical need for disruptive RF interference mitigation solutions. As networks are moving toward higher performance to accommodate larger capacity than ever seen before, the network operators, industry organizations, and equipment providers are looking into innovative technologies for next generation 5G wireless networks. There are two advantages offered by the proposed interference elimination technology. One advantage is extreme wide instantaneous bandwidth and the other is flexible tunability over GHz of operating frequency. These advantages help to consolidate and reduce front-end hardware. The focus of this program will be first on developing an optical system-on-chip version of the interference cancellation system with monolithically photonic integrated circuits. With a complete and fully function development board, the second focus will be on demonstrating the application in in-band interference mitigation for wireless backhaul networks, and showing improvement in 2x spectral efficiency and potential 1000x increase in capacity.