Fig.: Comparison of field patterns generated by three arrays serving the same area for (a) independent and (b) coherent arrays.
WiSE-affiliated faculty members and their colleagues from the RF-photonic startup, Phase Sensitive Innovations, Inc. (PSI), were invited speakers at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures (CISA) in Denver, Colorado, from May 20-23, 2024.
Among the four invited presentations at CISA, the paper Distributing Coherence Among Phased Arrays by Dr. Shouyuan Shi, Dr. Garrett Schneider, and Dr. Dennis Prather from WiSE, collaborated with Dr. Janusz Murakowski and Dr. Christopher Schuetz from PSI, introduces a new method for estimating and compensating for optical phase differences between photonically enabled access points (PAPs), also known as imaging receivers, connected to a central processing unit through an analog RF-over-fiber (A-RoF) fronthaul. The proposed adaptive feedback loop is designed to maintain RF phase coherence among distributed remote radio units (RRU) spanning multiple kilometers from the central processing unit. This coherent phase distribution is crucial for enabling cell-free MIMO in 6G wireless networks, as traditional digital RF-over-fiber (D-RoF) schemes become increasingly expensive for ultra-wideband transmission at high RF frequencies.