Abstract
The vision for future communication and radar systems has been articulated repeatedly as software-defined digital hardware that could emulate any radio waveform, with the concept that new waveforms could be added as required simply by uploading or updating new software.
This is essential in the era of big data which increasing volume (amount of data), velocity (speed of data), and variety (range of data types and sources) are needed.
One of the technical challenges is the design of antennas, which is required to cover a selection band of broad frequency spectrum and it must be steerable.
The concept of transformation optics (TO) offers us the exciting prospect of designing novel antennas, which go far beyond what can be accomplished with traditional materials in the form of lenses and reflectors, requiring both conventional materials and also those with properties that do not exist in nature (i.e., metamaterials).
Over recent years, Queen Mary University of London has developed several innovative antenna solutions based on metamaterials, especially non-foster’s active devices and 3D rapid free-forming process.
Working with our partners and the UK industry, we have developed the new composite metamaterials flat antenna lens, which could be embedded into the skin of an aircraft without compromising aerodynamic performance, representing a major leap forward from current airborne antennas.
With the A F Harvey Research Prize, we propose to extend our metamaterial antennas to the use of smart materials, which enable the full integration of multi-functions such as sensing, communication and computation with software-defined radios (SDR).
We will build and demonstrate several devices in collaboration with aerospace and communication stakeholders in areas such as healthcare, security, satellite/space and big data.
The proposed research is aimed to place the UK in a leading position in this exciting area, pushing the conceptual boundaries whilst at the same time exploring the practical problems of design and manufacturability
