SBIR Phase II: High-Speed TV-Band White Space Networks with Many-Antenna Multi-User Beamforming

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to provide wireless technology for economic high-speed internet connectivity in under-served rural regions, addressing the needs of 40 million Americans and over 50% of the global population. The technological developments in this project will pave the way for adoption of Massive, or Many-Antenna MIMO technologies in next-generation wireless systems by addressing scalability bottlenecks with innovative hardware and protocol design. The result of this project will be a revolutionary new wireless system for internet service providers addressing an $80 billion fixed wireless systems market and connecting under-served global communities to high-speed internet commerce, communications, education, and entertainment. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project will develop a production-ready Television White Space (TVWS) Massive MU-MIMO wireless system for IP data traffic, then use it to characterize for the first time diverse, large-scale multi-user TVWS channels. This project will demonstrate the first economically-viable Massive MIMO system, as well as the first point-to-multipoint wireless system capable of non-line-of-sight ranges over 10s of miles with over 2 Gbps of aggregate capacity. The system will be used to measure and characterize TVWS channels at scale in various rural environments, with large beamforming arrays serving tens of clients tens of miles away. In particular, these measurements will explore the effect of range, environment, user separation, and polarization on real-world achievable capacity. The results will be used to guide the design, optimization, and deployment of rural TVWS broadband networks across the world.