Towards Universal Radios with Near-zero Spectrum and Power Use (TURNSPEED)

The flexibility and ubiquity of wireless solutions has played an important role in the explosive growth of mobile radios used in laptops, smartphones and tablets. With the evolution towards wearable systems, mobile systems promise unprecedented opportunities for a hyper connected world. Today, this promise is only partially fulfilled, and important spectrum and battery bottlenecks hamper the full potential of the next generation wirelessly connected systems. Solving this requires a radical rethinking of wireless networking systems. This thesis proposes theory, algorithms, and proof-of-concept solutions for universal radios with near-zero power and spectrum resource requirements:

1) First, modulation techniques for low power receivers are studied and proposed, that allow to jointly transmit and receive data and power, leveraging the receiver's low power energy harvesting hardware and its non-linearity.

2) Secondly, a universal signal modification is proposed an analysed, that allow receiving any communication signal without power consuming hardware such as the RF local oscillator and mixer, to decrease the sensor's power consumption.

3) Next, it is studied how very large antenna arrays and cooperation can be used to create systems that can direct data or power deterministically towards users with near-zero spectrum or power use.

These three state-of-the art complementary research lines jointly hold the promise of achieving universal communication with near-zero spectrum and power resources.