Team debuts new approach to 6G wireless that offers speed, reliability and scalability

A team from the University of California San Diego and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has invented a scalable technology that enables faster and more reliable 5G and 6G wireless communication.  

“With our approach, we can support maybe 10 times more devices than before using the same bandwidth,” said Ish Kumar Jain, an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and alumnus of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “It also helps reduce latency (the delay in accessing the network) and maintains an extremely high data rate with all connected devices.” 

“I see a lot of excitement around this work,” notes UC San Diego alumnus Ish Kumar Jain, now an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Here, he presents the new research at the ACM MobiHoc 2025 international symposium.

The technique, dubbed “FlexLink” (patent pending), was co-developed by Dinesh Bharadia, associate professor with the Jacobs School of Engineering and affiliate of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, along with UC San Diego Ph.D. student Rohith Reddy Vennam. 

“I see a lot of excitement around this work,” noted Jain, who presented the research on October 27 at the ACM MobiHoc 2025 international symposium in Houston. “This is not conventional work where we use a conventional system. We really propose something fundamentally new.”  

Splitting Beams 

The team’s technique caters to 5G and 6G. Compared with 4G, these networks send messages using shorter wavelengths and typically rely on multiple antennas. Potential applications include machine-to-machine communication in virtual reality, industrial Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles. 

One of the issues in this area has been a bottleneck in which “control” signals, i.e. messages that configure system parameters like beam direction, bandwidth and other resources, are bundled with other data. That means that control messages often have to wait their turn behind bulky data traffic. This queueing, which is caused by how current antennas form and share beams, slows link setup, handovers and multi-user scheduling. 

“FlexLink tackles that bottleneck head-on by decoupling control and data beams in hardware,” said Bharadia, who directs the Center for Wireless Communications and works in UC San Diego’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “Instead of forcing everything down one direction at a time, FlexLink uses a special front-end called a delay-phased array to send separate, strong beams simultaneously—one dedicated to control, others to data—across the same wideband channel.” 

A prototype built by the FlexLink team members demonstrates their approach.

The paper noted the technique nearly doubles spectrum efficiency.  

“Especially in the satellite world, we are not using full bandwidth efficiency,” Vennam said. “FlexLink could reduce waste, with the same limited amount of power. 

Setting Next-Generation 6G Standards 

The team believes that the work is particularly persuasive because it is based on a simple mathematical equation backed by fundamental theory rather than complex computation.  

In addition, team members demonstrated the approach with actual hardware. “This isn’t just theoretical,” said Vennam. “It’s a feasible system.” 

Jain added: “We are hoping FlexLink will be part of next-generation 6G standards. Some companies have already expressed interest.” 

The paper, “FlexLink: Decoupling Control and Data Beams for Next-Generation Wideband Networks,” can be viewed at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3704413.3764470 . This work was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation awards #2211805 and #2232481.