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More Antennas, Faster Wireless
rouge86 writes "The New Scientist has a story on how researchers broke the network speed record using a wireless network and multiple antennas. They plan to use the demonstration to show how powerful multiple antennas can be. Applications include power saving on mobile phones and reducing interference."
For those who don't care about reading the entire article, the crux of it is:
Recombining smaller signals in real time, however, requires considerable computing power. So the Siemens team developed new computer algorithms in order to send more data using existing hardware.
In short: programmers managed to push existing hardware with a more efficient code. That's called hacking, albeit with a serious look, and I like that!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
this is the same post, as the dec 08 slashdot post here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/08/022625 0&from=rss/
OFDM has been around for a while OFDM History
It's nice to see more practical uses of it in wireless standards like WiFi IEEE 802.11a, 802.11g and in WiMax IEEE 802.16a.
All this adds up to the death of the control by telco's in the last 100 yards of net connectivity. Go OFDM!!
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Since the improvement was mainly a hack on the processing.. I'd guess that they went from some sort of fourier transform to wavelets.. wavelets have linear computational complexity (awesome) and don't have the interference problems that older signal processing algorithms have.
...now I have to buy a new phone again.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Having more antennas allows you to do interesting and useful things such as cancelling out multipath and multiuser interference. This has been studied for a long time now.
The three blades give a better shave since when you take one stroke, it takes three. Having four blades, however, is getting a little ridiculous.
And increasing it for the neighbour, unless he also has multiple antennas.
Wich gets us back to the start, only with even more interference...
Hivemind harvest in progress..
That's not a problem, considering the current 3G communications offerings, your wallet will be emptied before your battery.
Its not the size of your antenna, its the number you have??
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Where this will become really interesting is when there are enough wireless networks that they all link up. Once that happens, there won't be any need for ISPs as we know them - just get your wireless box and join the big mesh that's out there. No connection fees, no censorship - then we will have a truly free internet. Transatlantic etc. links will be slower, but I'm sure that's a problem we'll overcome.
I am trolling
They said the same about phone networks when satalites were introduced. Now our world is connected by fibre. All of these measures, wireless, ADSL, cable modems are a stopgap for the fact that fibre is still too expensive to run into every house.
If (and when) a breakthrough is made, either with an economic optical switch or the pricing of electronic processing equipment for optical fibre, wireless will once again take a back seat.
d
Ok, after the (mostly) needless citing is done, I find it nave to have faith in science. Then again, it seems to be the most powerful metatool we have found. I call it a metatool for it allows you to both create another tools and to refine itself into being an even better tool. Perhaps Chemistry won't solve all mankind's problems, on its own, or perhaps it will, or perhaps solving that will require several sciences combined. I can't see that far. Science may not be the answer to all (because we know the answer is 42 -see Douglas Addams-), but it's the best approximation we have found yet.
I see nothing new in this principle - anyone knows that more aerials are better - in fact, if you increase the number of aerials so that their combined length (l) matches the exact distance between the sender and the receiver (ie: l = d), AND then you place each aerial in and end-to-end configuration so that electrons can flow in an unbroken path from transmitter to receiver then you have a very efficient data transmission medium - heck, the principle even works with optical fibre and photons too.
AT&ROFLMAO
Yeah, ham radio operators have a saying that's old as the hills: If you want more signal, stick up more metal.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
so now i need six more pringles cans for my end alone?
...I got nothing.
...for standardization as 802.11n
Proposals were submitted back in August for 802.11n, and all proposals still in the running use MIMO+OFDM (the technique described here). Hardware supporting various prototypes is already around in a usable form.
It seems unlikely that 3x4 MIMO will be around in the first wave, due to cost constraints - 2x3 (2 tx, 3 rx) is the most likely initial configuration.