NIST Researchers Showcase Successful mmWave Industrial IoT Measurement Capability

On February 5, 2025, NIST researchers presented the results of their highly successful Innovation in Measurement Science (IMS) project, “The World’s Best IIoT Testbed,” to NIST senior management including the Associate Director for Laboratory Programs (ADLP), Dr. Chuck Romine. NIST’s internal competitive IMS program provides up to 5 years of funding for proposals from NIST staff that have potential for high, transformative impact and for significant advancement of NIST’s capabilities and mission. As a result of this IIoT testbed project, NIST has produced a new hybrid reflective/anechoic chamber capability for assessing the radio performance of industrial wireless devices and networks operating in millimeter-wave bands between 28 GHz and 63 GHz. This new chamber provides a calibrated and traceable environment for evaluating industrial wireless devices with beamforming antennas in realistic, reflective environments. These bands are supported by the 3GPP 5G standard for devices operating in the FR2 band and also by IEEE 802.11 devices operating at 60 GHz.

This project supported a coordinated effort among several NIST Laboratories, including the Communications Technology Laboratory (CTL), Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), Engineering Technology Laboratory (EL), and Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML). Rick Candell of CTL’s Smart Connected Systems Division and Kate Remley of CTL’s RF Technology Division were two principal proposers and champions. 

In this effort, Mohamed Hany and Rick Candell provided communications systems expertise for industrial environments, connection to industry through standardization and the NIST Industrial Wireless Systems Technical Interest Group, and delivered sustained technical contributions using machine learning for the analysis of measurements, channel exemplar extraction, and chamber automation using reinforcement learning approaches. Michael Frey and Lucas Koepke of ITL developed a framework for applying confidence bounds to wireless-device performance metrics such as error vector magnitude as a function of channel conditions. Kate Remley, Rob Horansky, Josh Kast and others in CTL focused on the hybrid-chamber development and calibration, enabling users to physically create myriad spatially varying, reflective channels as might be found on a factory floor. Calibrations allow separately identifying non-idealities of the testbed environment from non-ideal performance of the device under test. Vladimir Aksyuk of PML and Aly Artusio-Glimpse, Matt Simons, and Chris Holloway of CTL developed and patented a wafer-scale atomic sensor array with a dielectric photonic integrated circuit for non-invasive RF channel measurements.  

Follow-on work utilizing this new capability is planned to include the development of dynamic channel replication for the evaluation of rapid-response phased-array antenna designs and, given the highly variable behavior of hybrid anechoic/reflective chambers, an AI-assisted configuration of the chamber to accurately produce desired channel characteristics.