Some of you may have heard of pCells from Artemis Networks, a technology proposed by Artemis Networks that claims to nearly arbitrarily increase wireless channel capacity given a fixedamount of spectrum.

Initially, the concept was met with deep skepticism.

This may be a good case of where experts can be wrong, even about deeply technical subjects.

Just a couple of examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bO0tjAdOIw (there is a loud naysayer in the audience)

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/01/dido_snake_oil_or_saviour/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732821

https://www.quora.com/Is-pCell-from-Artemis-really-the-Holy-Grail-of-wireless-networking

At first glance it would appear that this would violate the Shannon limit, but, rules are after all, meant to be broken. Or in this case, followed exactly but just sidestepped for our specific application ;)

Here, I show that recent results in research in the area of superoscilations support the generation of sub-diffraction limit balls of RF radiation.

The first paper shows that sub-diffraction limit three dimensional balls of RF radiation can be created, which is similar to the Artemis claim.

However, superoscillations must, in order to avoid violating physical laws, come at the price of energy dumped into side-lobes, which are of much higher power than the actual desired focusing region. Even if these side-lobes were dumped away from the transmitter, due to the polynomial increase in side-band power and exponential increase in variability, this would result in the tremendous RF noise pollution.

However, it turns out that this is only true in free space, when we consider superoscillations only in a fixed region, it turns out that sub-diffraction superoscillation focusing points without side lobes are a valid solution to Maxwell’s equations in an enclosed region.

This has recently been experimentally demonstrated in a so-called “Huygens Box”

Outside of the research context of superoscillations, this technique has been known as “distributed beamforming” and has been investigated for a wide array of applications, from wireless energy transfer to interception-free communication:

Now, the concept is not without limitations, as it is still ultimately limited by the number of transmitting antennae. In addition, the concept appears infeasible for wireless power transfer given the extremely low total energy to projected energy ratios of the order of ~100–1000X. However, considering the enormous complexity and cost of 5G and mmWave 5G systems, this may be a possible way forward for telecommunications, especially given the backwards compatibility with 4G phones. At the very least, it validates Artemis’s claims and negates the skepticism of “industry experts”. Furthermore, possibilities exist to dramatically extend the focusing capability, at least in the regime of information and imaging, which I plan to publish in the future.