SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to support rapidly growing wireless data usage with fixed available bandwidth through the provision of more robust synchronization. Modern high-speed communication is heavily dependent on precise synchronization between transmitters and receivers to enable efficient data throughput. This project pioneers an entirely novel technique based on ?Spiral Polynomial Division Multiplexing? (SPDM) to enable precise and efficient synchronization. It offers a new set of approaches for improving synchronization, with possible applications to any communication systems that face extreme spectral efficiency demands, or which are challenged by particularly difficult synchronization problems such as communication with high-speed vehicles such as trains. This project could lead to commercialization across a wide range of communication sectors including but not limited to wireless, mobile internet, unmanned vehicles, automotive, aviation, and Internet of Things. It has major potential applications in both civilian and defense applications. SPDM shows promise in providing more robust communications that are resistant to interference and jamming. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the problem of achieving very precise synchronization between a transmitter and receiver, while expending minimal power and bandwidth to do so. The research objective is to show that a new type of synchronization, based on SPDM, enables superior synchronization performance than is possible with previous methods. SPDM introduces a new way of combining, or multiplexing, signals based on orthogonality in the polynomial coefficient space. This results in a very large waveform design space, which can be bandlimited using polynomial convolution with a ?shaping polynomial?. Synchronization can be achieved within SPDM by checking for the time alignment which produces a ?reasonable result? when the shaping polynomial is deconvolved in the receiver, which can be a very sensitive test due to the special properties of SPDM polynomials. The research will involve systematically testing SPDM synchronization under a variety of conditions, examining performance data, and comparing against standard synchronization methods. It is anticipated that this research will show significant benefits for SPDM synchronization in at least some practically important situations, forming the basis for further research leading to deployment of SPDM-based systems.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is that it addresses the bandwidth crisis, the problem of transmitting an exponentially growing amount of data through a fixed amount of increasingly congested spectrum. The bandwidth crisis limits economic growth by constraining communication, and also poses very serious challenges for national defense and disaster response. Making better use of limited spectrum is therefore of high societal and commercial importance. This project will study a new approach, called spiral modulation, for achieving much more spectrally efficient communication than previously thought possible and thereby directly addressing the bandwidth crisis. Commercially, this could facilitate much more rapid data transfer, enhancing existing business applications and enabling new ones. Spiral modulation is applicable to any form of electromagnetic communication, whether wireless or wire-based. It could lead to commercialization across a wide range of communication sectors including but not limited to wireless, mobile internet, unmanned vehicles, automotive, aviation, and Internet of Things. It is a dual use technology with both civilian and defense applications. Ultimately, spiral modulation could become the core technology for the worldwide telecommunications industry.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project applies new mathematics to the problem of encoding information into waveforms for telecommunication. In current digital communication, information is transmitted using symbol waveforms constructed from sinusoids which have constant amplitude over each symbol period. This approach is known to produce a sharp upper bound on the highest spectral efficiency that can be achieved. By instead constructing symbol waveforms from sinusoidal waveforms with continuously-varying amplitude, spiral modulation bypasses the theoretical limitation on spectral efficiency. Building on prior Phase I research, this project will build an end-to-end hardware prototype to establish the implementation path and performance characteristics of spiral modulation. The research will progress in stages from waveform design and spectral efficiency measurement experiments, through end-to-end radio design in software, the hardware prototype development and documentation of best practices. It is anticipated that this research will show significant spectral efficiency advantages over existing signal modulation techniques. Other possible advantages for spiral modulation may also appear, such as greater tolerance for interference and phase distortion.