Every time you make a phone call, stream a video or connect to Wi-Fi, your device is sending and receiving invisible signals through the air. So are your baby monitor, garage door opener, your GPS, the weather-monitoring satellites and the radars keeping planes safely apart. All of these rely on the same invisible resource: the radio spectrum.
The demand for wireless data – driven by smartphones, video streaming and billions of connected devices – keeps growing, making available spectrum scarce. But it doesn’t have to remain that way. As an electrical engineer who studies wireless communications, I’m part of a field of research working to address the radio spectrum supply crunch.