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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.
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
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