A new technology that ensures fast and reliable 5G connectivity between a base station and receiver has been developed by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego. The team will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCOMM 2021 conference USA, which is taking place online from August 23 to 27, 2021. High band 5G systems communicate data by sending one laser-like millimetre wave beam between a base station and a receiver, but the connection gets blocked if something or someone gets in the way of that beam’s path, theengineer.co.uk reported . “Relying on a single beam creates a single point of failure,” said Dinesh Bharadia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, who is the senior author on the ACM SIGCOMM paper. Bharadia and his team, who are part of the UC San Diego Center for Wireless Communications, split the one laser-like millimetre wave beam into multiple laser-like beams, and have each beam take a different path from the base station to the receiver. The idea is to improve the chances that at least one beam reaches the receiver when an obstacle is in the way.