Bristol Uni buys kit for 5G research

Following closely on the announcement that the University of Bristol in a consortium to research 5G mobile wireless systems within the European 5G-XHaul project (news passim), the university reported yesterday that its 5G research has been given a boost thanks to a grant of £540,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a state-of-the-art upgrade to Bristol’s wireless channel emulation facility.

Researchers and collaborators associated with Bristol University’s Communication Systems and Networks (CSN) Group now have a pair of Anite F8 channel emulators and duplexing filters to augment the test and measurement equipment in their laboratory. The funding, through an EPSRC equipment award, also included training event from Anite to ensure the equipment is used effectively.

The new hardware can be rapidly configured to support up to 16 independent streams with a bandwidth of 160MHz, thereby facilitating the testing and optimisation of the latest proposals for WiFi and long-term evolution (LTE) enhancements. What is unique about Bristol’s configuration is that the multiple channels can be ‘stacked’ in the frequency domain facilitating the test and optimisation of antenna array and beamforming techniques for millimetre wave wireless access technologies.

Professor Andrew Nix, Dean of Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering and the leader of the Bristol CSN Group, said: “Anite’s Propsim F8 channel emulators with enhanced bandwidth capability will open a new avenue in our 5G research projects, such as mmMAGIC and 5G-XHaul, part of the Horizon 2020 programme, as well as collaborative projects with industry.”