Dr Stephen Henthorn
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Lecturer in Wireless Communications
Full contact details
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
- Profile
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I received my MEng and PhD degrees from the University of Sheffield in 2015 and 2019, respectively. During my PhD I investigated how metamaterials can be used to produce low cost, energy efficient transmitters for wireless communications, and explored suitable modulation formats and waveforms for this new class of transmitters. I was then a Research Associate also at Sheffield in the Electronic and Electrical Engineering department, where I worked on direct RF sampling receivers for low footprint energy efficient receivers.
From spring 2020 I have been an Academic Fellow, with responsibilities for teaching and research. I supervise undergraduate and postgraduate research projects on wireless communications and electromagnetics, and lecture on electromagnetic compatibility, where I aim to enable students to consider how the systems they design in the future may impact on other equipment in their environment.
My research is primarily focussed on energy efficient communications. This is becoming increasingly important as mobile communications expands, with power consumption of networks rising sharply with the introduction of 5G. I am particularly interested in applying newly mature and emerging electromagnetic technologies, such as metamaterials, in wireless transceivers and mobile networks. This is now an expanding topic in research for 6G mobile, where the ability of metasurfaces to manipulate signals offers new ways of designing communications systems by controlling the propagation environment. These techniques are often referred to as Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) or Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS).
I am also available to take, or assist in taking, a variety of microwave measurements, including radiation patterns and reflection parameters, as well as system-level measurements such as error vector magnitude and error rates where appropriate.
- Qualifications
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PhD (Electronic Engineering, University of Sheffield) 2019
MEng (Electronic Engineering with Communications, University of Sheffield) 2015
- Research interests
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Directly modulating antennas
Reconfigurable metasurfaces and antennas
Intelligent reflecting surfaces/Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Energy efficient wireless transceivers
Intelligent reconfigurable surfaces for wireless communications
Modulation techniques and waveforms
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Concurrent multiband direct RF sampling receivers. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 1-1.
- Direct antenna modulation for high-order phase shift keying. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. View this article in WRRO
- Bit-Error-Rate Performance of Quadrature Modulation Transmission Using Reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surfaces. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 16, 2038-2041. View this article in WRRO
- A system‐level performance evaluation of a reconfigurable filtenna in the presence of in‐ and out‐of‐band blockers. IET Communications.
Conference proceedings papers
- Tuneable Polarisation Agnostic Reflectarray Element at mmWave Using Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal. 2023 17th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 26 March 2023 - 31 March 2023.
- Machine Learning-Assisted Optimization of a Metasurface-Based Directly Modulating Antenna. 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting (AP-S/URSI), 10 July 2022 - 15 July 2022.
- The effect of ADC resolution on concurrent, multiband, direct RF sampling receivers. 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 7 December 2021 - 11 December 2021. View this article in WRRO
- Metasurface direct antenna modulators in non-line of sight channels for the Internet of Things. 2020 IEEE 31st Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications. London, UK, 31 August 2020 - 3 September 2020.
- Direct antenna modulator for m-QAM applications. Proceeding of 2020 14th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP). Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 March 2020 - 20 March 2020.
- Tri-band Single Chain Radio Receiver for Concurrent Radio. 2020 2nd 6G Wireless Summit (6G SUMMIT), 17 March 2020 - 20 March 2020.
- A low-complexity array of directly phase modulating antennas. 12th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2018)
- A low-loss reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surface based antenna for Direct Antenna Modulation. Loughborough Antennas & Propagation Conference (LAPC 2017) View this article in WRRO
- Frequency selective surface loaded antenna for direct antenna modulation. 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP), 19 March 2017 - 24 March 2017. View this article in WRRO
- Direct Antenna Modulation with Frequency Selective Surfaces. 5th Colloquium on Antennas, Wireless and Electromagnetics (CAWE 2017)
Datasets
- Concurrent multiband direct RF sampling receivers. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 1-1.
- Professional activities and memberships
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ECR co-lead of Wireless and Microwave Special Interest Group, EPSRC UK Metamaterials Network