HOUSTON – (Nov. 7, 2025) – The next generation of wireless communication will move into signal frequencies even higher than those of today's 5G systems, allowing signals to carry vastly more data at much higher speeds. These high-frequency bands, expected to underpin future 6G networks, could support data-hungry technologies such as untethered virtual reality headsets and real-time sensing systems.
However, these higher frequencies come with a trade-off: The signal fades more rapidly as it travels through air and cannot pass through physical barriers, which means transmitters and receivers will have to align directly through narrow, line-of-sight links instead of the diffuse connections of today's Wi-Fi.
Researchers at Rice University and collaborators have developed a new way to make those links nearly instantaneous. The team found a way to generate and control radio wave patterns that can identify a signal's direction within one-tenth of a degree — about ten times better than existing approaches — enabling high data-rate links to form almost as soon as the signal is sent.
"The method we introduce in our paper unlocks extremely rapid angle estimation with unprecedented accuracy," said Burak Bilgin, a Rice doctoral student who is a first author on a study published in Nature Communications Engineering. "This, in turn, allows for wireless links to be rapidly established or recovered with minimal latency. This means that our method will allow wireless devices to rapidly find each other, which is essential to unlock unprecedented data rates in the next generation of wireless networks."
Bilgin compared the method to a lighthouse "emitting multiple colors of light, where the intensity of each color traveling outward to all directions is randomized." The lighthouse in this analogy is the wireless transmitter, the ships are the receivers, and the dispersed light corresponds to the radio waves.
"The ships around the lighthouse — i.e., the wireless receivers — can determine their exact location vis-à-vis the lighthouse based on the set of colors and corresponding intensities they observe, which are unique along each direction thanks to the randomization," Bilgin said.
To demonstrate the idea, the researchers used a thin electronic surface known as a metasurface, fabricated by collaborators at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories: When a broadband signal hits the metasurface, it scatters into a distinct pattern that depends on both the direction and the frequency of the wave. Each direction produces its own signature — a kind of electromagnetic fingerprint that receivers can compare against a prerecorded library to identify where the signal originated. The process takes only a few picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.
Previous approaches could change a signal over time or across different frequencies but not both at once. The Rice-led team figured out how to use the metasurface to generate patterns that vary both across frequency and over time.
"Returning to the lighthouse analogy, our work is the first to have both multicolor and time-varying transmission," Bilgin said. "Because the random broadcast of colors is rerandomized across different time windows, the ships can make a more accurate estimation with extended observations in case the weather is foggy (noisy wireless signal) or the lighthouse is not capable of emitting many different colors (bandwidth limitations)."
As wireless networks move into the terahertz range, this kind of precision will become essential.
The experiments required large volumes of data to analyze how the randomized signals behaved statistically. Collaborators at Brown University contributed to the theoretical and physical modelling of the electromagnetic behavior.
"It is a study of programmed randomness," Bilgin said. "We collected a lot of data to study the average behavior. It took planning and smart scheduling, and the research had its share of unexpected setbacks, such as when the power went out during an experiment. But it was rewarding to see the results line up with our expectations."
Edward Knightly , the Sheafor-Lindsay Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of computer science at Rice, said the work offers an early glimpse of how wireless systems will evolve as data demands rise.
"The physics of the signal itself shape what networks can do," Knightly said. "This study turns that challenge into an opportunity, showing that randomness — when engineered correctly — can make wireless networks faster, smarter and more reliable."
The research was supported Cisco and Intel, the U.S. National Science Foundation (2433923, 2402783, 2211618, 2402781, 2433924, 2211616, 1954780), the Army Research Office (W911NF-23-1-0340), the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science by Los Alamos National Laboratory (89233218CNA000001) and Sandia National Laboratories (DE-NA-0003525). The content in this press release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of funding organizations and institutions.
