E41: The Future of Cellular, Wireless, and Space-Based Communications | Alexander Wyglinski | Graduate Studies – Electrical and Computer Engineering

There have been 7,270 rocket launches by humanity. Wow. Right? And then of those rocket launches, the number of satellites that these rockets have put into orbit in total since 1957 was 26,890. Wow. That's a massive... Okay. Now- Sure. Incredible Um, and then- My mind is blown. Yeah. No, no, but it gets, it... But wait, there's more.
You know? But there is more.

Welcome to The WPI Podcast. I'm Shawn Needham from WPI's Marketing Communications division. Today, I'm chatting with Alex Wyglinski, associate dean of Graduate Studies and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, or ECE, at WPI. Whether you're sending an email, making a phone call, or using the navigation in your car, you're benefiting from the out-of-this-world advancements in space-based communications, which is pretty much any data exchanged via satellite.
During the show, you'll hear Alex and I talk about terrestrial communications, including land and sea-based ones, and non-terrestrial communications, including cellular and wireless ones, some of which connect directly with satellites. Our conversation will move almost as fast as the very communications we'll be discussing, so tighten your seatbelts and enjoy.

Let's start, and we are recording this via Zoom, which is a great way really to illustrate the power of today's communication. So I'm home on a fiber optic connection. I did plug in my ethernet because- Sure ... I knew that was gonna be the most reliable way to do this. So- Yep ... on, on the ground below me is kind of a chaos of cables.

You're on WPI's main campus, and right now there's all kinds of connections happening and both non-terrestrial and terrestrial that are making this happen, so that's really cool. Yep. No, it is. We live in such a hyper-connected world. I would say most of our connectivity is terrestrial in nature, right? They always talk about last mile, where you leave, let's say, that back hall and try and reach every single household, every single person.

Is it done by wired connection, like let's say a fiber optic connection? Maybe it's a copper line like a coax cable. Maybe it's a 5G wireless connection or some other sort of wireless technology or wired technology, right? But what has happened is there are still many little pockets across the planet that don't have any sort of, like, broadband connectivity.

We refer to those as broadband deserts, right? And so a lot of folks have been kind of figuring out what would be the most cost-effective way of reaching that remaining 10% of the population, and that's a number that reflects the United States population. There was a keynote presentation that was done at, in Hanover, Germany in 2009 at a conference that I attended and presented at, I had several papers there, called Crowncom, and the keynote speaker was Joseph Mitola.

And he was like the guy who coined the term cognitive radio, which is like highly intelligent, pretty much AI-driven wireless communication systems and networks that adapt and optimize to whatever sort of radio performance, whatever sort of experience that y- the user is trying to have from their wireless device and from their wireless network.

And he gave this really interesting keynote saying that last mile to access the remaining broadband deserts, it's gotta be space base. It's gotta be satellite communications. And why is that? Well, you look at a lot of places in Massachusetts, and what happens is what are the dilemmas some of these companies are experiencing rolling out fiber?

Let's roll it up to your house, like no problem. Oops, telephone pole is too short. Or we'll try and bury it. Oops. Bedrock is immediately below the ground. And what's really interesting is that since that 2009 keynote talk, there was some discussion. People said, "Oh, that's not possible. That's too futuristic.

The latency, the amount of delay you experience sending a message up and getting it back down from a satellite is just too much. That's not gonna make for real time wireless communications." But then we began having these companies come out and deploying thousands and thousands of satellites in things called CubeSats, really small form factor satellites, thousands of them into orbit, and now those can provide broadband wireless connectivity anywhere around the planet.
There was even a project that was funded by the US National Science Foundation. This was a project where WPI was a sub-award to. The lead was Missouri University of Science and Technology. It was awarded by the National Science Foundation through something called US Ignite, and it was called Overcome 21, right?

That was the program. And it was to find out new ways of delivering broadband connectivity, again, to those broadband deserts. And we had, as our test site, a small town in Missouri only 40 miles away from Kansas City, Missouri. Like, not that far. What happened is when we were talking with folks, they were talking about how they're using cellular hotspots to create Wi-Fi and connectivity and things like that, but in a makeshift way, but nothing really plug it in, there you go, you have broadband.

For their economy, for their, the conveniences of education and entertainment and connectivity with family, right? Sure. Finances and stuff, they couldn't be left behind. Right. Yeah. It really is. It's a lifeline for people in many cases. Today, a lot of us have cameras connected to internet connections, the Internet of Things- Yeah IoT. But it's an equalizer as well because it opens up opportunities for even, let's just say, education. During COVID, it was a time when it really separated those that have good computers, good internet, and their ability to access education. No, exactly. And I think that was the moment in the United States when COVID happened between 2020 and 2022, people realized firsthand, wow, we're that dependent on connectivity Let's take a step back.

We're gonna go back- Yeah ... we're gonna enter the time machine, go back- Mm-hmm ... um, at least a few decades. Okay. Yeah. Um, so this is my sort of lay person when I think about, or space-based communication, I immediately think of Sputnik- Mm-hmm ... which was the, the first satellite to orbit the Earth in 1957. The ability to launch a platform into orbit for a sustained amount of time in a controllable manner was critical for laying the groundworks of what we have today in terms of our space communication infrastructure, right?

I think Sputnik showed feasibility of us as the human race doing that, shows, like, feasibility, so fantastic, right? So that's really important, whereas obviously we go to our WPI alum, Robert Goddard, showing the feasibility of launching a rocket, right? But did it reach enough of an elevation that it could, like, deploy a satellite platform?

Well, not yet, but we proved feasibility. Nowadays, when I mention CubeSat, I mean we're talking small, right? And so what would happen is essentially you would have a rocket, it would go in orbit. It would go ploop, ploop, ploop, ploop, ploop, firing off tens of CubeSats into orbit, and then they would self-organize such that it would cover the entire globe with wireless access to these CubeSats.

Now, the main thing here is infrastructure. Back in the day in 2005, you couldn't put out hundreds of these satellites in orbit. Nowadays, like for instance, if you look at Starlink, we're talking about on the orders of over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, right? And- The more you get out there, the better it is.

So ever since the launch of Sputnik, there have been 7,270 l- rocket launches by humanity. Wow. Right? And then of those rocket launches, the number of satellites that these rockets have put into orbit in total since 1957 was 26,890. Wow. That's a massive... Okay. Now- Sure. Incredible ... um, and then the- My mind is blown.

Yeah. No, no, but it gets, it... But wait, there's more. You know? But there is more. Um, the number of those still in space, because some of them fall into Earth's orbit, some of them go out into the ether. I'm sure it's probably hard to say, but I would hope that most of them would burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, but some of them do hit the ground.

Yeah. I mean, depends on the size, right? So in reentry- Sure ... they might burn up, they might end up in an ocean, they might collide and then make more space debris, which is not good. In fact, it's quite harmful because if a chunk of space debris f- whizzing around the orbit of the Earth kinda collides into a space station, collides into a satellite, collides, it causes damage, right?

Sure. It's like a car accident. So to give perspective, ever since the 1950s, humanity has been very invested in the space around the Earth, right? In terms of connectivity, in terms of things like national defense, in terms of weather prediction, in terms of, like, scientific research. Uh, like- GPS ... GPS, navigation, which imagine all our cellphone apps, almost everything we do, a lot of those services are location-based.

Sure. Right? Which since you have, you know, the first smartphones released, just to your point, the, the amount of communication just from your cellphone up into space is just incredible. And now you have some companies that are enabling satellite communication for the everyday consumer if they don't have a cellphone signal.

And in some cases, those have saved people's lives. Yep. Exactly. So the impact to space is quite pronounced. So we have this scale, and with that, though, to your point, there does come a lot of risk. One thing I'm thinking about is redundancy. And a lot of times, like, especially when it's critical, whether it's medical, whether it's defense or whatnot, how vulnerable are some of these systems?

There's no such thing as something that's foolproof, right? But I think there's enough redundancy built inside the system that as the more we continue building them up, the less likely they're gonna be susceptible to outages and such. So that's a key reason why a lot of these broadband low Earth orbit or LEO satellite systems, right, that are out there they're trying to build up to constel- space constellations, satellite constellations on the orders of tens of thousands, right?

Because let's suppose, like, everyone's favorite space phenomenon, the solar flares or space weather- Mm-hmm ... you just need one of those, bzz, and they can fry a lot of these systems. So to me, in terms of security, in terms of the how safe these networks are, like the space-based infrastructure, it really, the big thing- The number one thing is obviously how well it does against things like space weather.

Then the other thing obviously is it's gonna get continuously crowded up there, and then there's also the issue of, let's say, cybersecurity up in space as well. Like, the idea of is my information that I'm communicating up there in orbit, is it safe? Are there any weak spots? Can it be eavesdropped along?

Can there be some sort of threat that is, that's caused up there to disrupt my network, right? Mm-hmm. And so it's factors like this, both intentional and unintentional threats to these networks are very real. But I think a lot of people are ... That's also where a lot of mainstream wireless research is really turning towards, things like how do you make the network more resilient?

How do you make the wireless communication lower latency? How do you make the network more secure against- Mm-hmm ... external threats? Sure. And at WPI, as we know, we're leaders in this kind of research i- in the work that you do and also in the work that your colleagues do, and our friends that work in cybersecurity and study these things, and help conduct research that will inform the experts to hopefully get in front of a lot of these threats.

Because it is something that I think about quite a bit, and now that, I mean, even, like, my car is connected to a cell signal, um, I mean, I can hardly log into it half the time, so hopefully it's not gonna get hacked. But yeah- ... it, it certainly is, it's something to be aware of. Hey, I'm Colleen Wombak, one of the hosts of the WPI Podcast.

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Find us wherever you get your podcasts or at wpi.edu/listen. People are talking about 6G. Mm-hmm. But I think in terms of- Wait, you're reading my mind, 'cause I was gonna ask. I mean, I, I... And I, we both, we talked about, again, veiling the unfolding of 5G. And you've been a point person with the media with the 5G rollout.

And I think to your point, there are still incredible advancements that 5G has not even, that we haven't fully tapped into the potential of it yet. I'm curious about 6G. Will that be a leaps and bounds difference compared between 4G and, and 5G? Oh, yeah. So, so right now with, with 5G, um, one of the main things that it tried to do is it tried to integrate whole, a whole disparate collection of wireless technologies under one umbrella, right?

And basically came along and say, "I want all these technologies and all these applications to be supported by 5G." It all looked like the 5G network, right? But it didn't spend a lot of time- Kind of like integrating everyone's favorite technology these days, which is AI. Mm-hmm. So 6G is gonna be very much heavily based on AI optimization, AI control, and really enabling The 5G umbrella, to manage it, to optimize it, to control it, using AI, that's gonna be 6G, and it's also gonna massively scale it.

If you ask me all the time, big thing that I talk about, like, when I think of 5G, that I think we're starting to see and just gonna keep on growing, is the Internet of Things, or IoT, right? When it came out, initially with, uh, 5G, everybody says, "This looks like 4G." And I would say, for the most part, most of it, correct.

Yeah, yeah. It's 4G with some additional frequency bands that have been, like, received in auction, like the 3.5 gigahertz band. Mm-hmm. So we now, we have a lot more bandwidth. A- again, this is another great transition. You have already spoken to this, that in the 1950s with television, that of course was largely wireless, but then you had cable to bring TV to the neighborhoods that couldn't get those waves.

So you've had this back and forth of, like, terrestrial and non-terrestrial. I wanna go watch E.T. now. But that's such an interesting thing- ... that in, in a very wireless world, in some ways we have ... I mean, we have cables under the ocean. Like, there's- Yeah ... so many cables still. Because- Oh, go ahead ... here's the thing, here's the thing about that.

So satellite communications introduces a lot of latency. That's why we still have transatlantic cables. Their bandwidth is massive compared to satellite communications. Their latency is way less.

Let's do rapid fire. Tell us the difference between Wi-Fi and internet, or the internet service provider. A, a lot of times now, people, they connotate Wi-Fi with internet. Yep. Give us, like, the, the short, how are they different? So Wi-Fi is a wireless technology. Internet is an application. So I could have Wi-Fi providing me with internet. I can have 5G provide me with internet. I can still have cable modems providing me with internet, or fiber optic connection. But internet is the service that we get in order to connect us to streaming video services, to email, to web browsing, but Wi-Fi is a wireless technology that provides us with that connectivity.

Awesome. I believe I know the answer to this, but- But ask it anyway. Is it still advisable to turn off cellular when you are on an airplane? Actually, yes, definitely, because the cellular technology uses frequency bands that are very close to and could potentially interfere with, let's say, the frequency bands that are used for radar, altimeters, and other sort of avionics that are needed by an airplane for various operations such as takeoff and landing.

And I believe 5G, did it exacerbate that risk a little bit? So what happened was when 5G began using the 3.6 gigahertz band, like the CBRS frequency bands, it turns out that radar altimeters operate relatively close by. But what happened is prior to that, CBRS frequencies were not used for any sort of cellular connectivity, right?

And so those radar altimeters were optimized back in the 1980s with a very specific set of wireless technologies operating around it. Now, fast-forward to today, and now you have a new wireless technology that was brought up. Now those two have to figure out how to coexist with each other, right? So I think right now the discussion is, how do we make radar altimeters or the successor to radar altimeter, radar altimeters and the 5G, 6G communication networks that we have coexist with each other given now that they're literally right next to each other in terms of frequency bands.

Last question maybe. Okay. What excites you most about non-terrestrial networks and anything we've talked about, the vast frontier of these communications? Well, the fact that we're dealing with stuff that's in space always excites me, right? But I think, I think the thing is- Going back to what I mentioned about that keynote talk at that conference I attended in 2009 in Hanover, Germany, where somebody was saying you can get real broadband wireless service from a satellite anywhere around the world, and I thought it was science fiction, only to see that now becoming a reality, right?

And continues to build up and becomes a much more reliable and potentially higher data rate type of service, I think is mind-boggling. It's like everything is accelerating. What was considered science fiction is now becoming reality. That's what excites me, and it really excites me that here at WPI, the stuff that my undergraduate students are doing, the stuff that my graduate students are doing, maybe in 10 years' time it's gonna become a reality.

It will become commercial products. Like, so for instance, as one good example, we just finished wrapping up a project that focuses on lunar 5G communications. We're gonna have an MQP on lunar communications this coming fall, the fall 2026, uh- Wow ... semester. And we're gonna be exploring how that can be feasible, right?

So, so that's what makes it really exciting. Wireless communications, along with AI, is accelerating in terms of innovation, in terms of advances that help humanity. That's what's great about WPI. Because of that theory and practice, we're translating those advances into the classroom. And then what do we have?

We're graduating that next generation of those technological innovators, those leaders, those entrepreneurs that are- Sure ... that are gonna really push that envelope in the next 10 years. The future is bright, and it is connected, and WPI, its professors and students, are helping to drive that. Alex- Yep ... it has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for your generous time, and we are so excited to be sharing this episode.

I'm Jon Cain from the WPI Podcast. We've got plenty more episodes on student life, research, innovation, and the stories behind what makes WPI unique. So be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and keep listening.