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MIT Scientists Develop New Wi-Fi That's 330% Faster (msn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: Scientists at MIT claim to have created a new wireless technology that can triple Wi-Fi data speeds while also doubling the range of the signal. Dubbed MegaMIMO 2.0, the system will shortly enter commercialization and could ease the strain on our increasingly crowded wireless networks. Multiple-input-multiple-output technology, or MIMO, helps networked devices perform better by combining multiple transmitters and receivers that work simultaneously, allowing then to send and receive more than one data signal at the same time. MIT's MegaMIMO 2.0 works by allowing several routers to work in harmony, transmitting data over the same piece of spectrum. MIT claimed that during tests, MegaMIMO 2.0 was able to increase data transfer speed of four laptops connected to the same Wi-Fi network by 330 percent. Paper co-author Rahul said the technology could also be applied to mobile phone networks to solve similar congestion issues. "In today's wireless world, you can't solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another," Ezzeldin Hamed, lead author on a paper on the topic, told MIT News. "The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum."
330% is 3.3 times faster.
Usually I would say %330 as fast meaning 3.3 times the speed. or 1/3 the time to transmit the same data.
Does "faster" usually mean a different thing than "as fast".
Except for high security environments, I wonder if we will soon see the day when wired network access is as rare as 8-track cartridges?
Can I be the only person who can't fucking stand the quality (speed, latency, instability) of Wifi / 3G / bollocks connectivity?
If I want something with a radio, I'll build it myself, and it will transmit half way round the world with no infrastructure. Otherwise, give me delicious wires and very well maintained point to point radio connections.
Since they are talking about many devices connecting to multiple routers it's not going to do much for the average home user then. I may have a couple of devices but only the one router. They haven't found a new Wi-Fi but a method for coordinating the routers to handle the load as they say their method could be applied to cell stations too.
My Wi-Fi is already capable of speeds much faster than what I get from my isp. I could see the need for faster Wi-Fi if I transferred tons of files from one room to another, but I don't have that need.
First give me faster internet speed; then maybe I'll need faster Wi-Fi.
Humans are machines - political problems are science problems. Just remember to take account of humanity, the most valuable aspect of the machinery.
I can appreciate that the Internet has brought little positive change to the worst off, and distracted the middle classes. It's primarily an entertainment medium, whatever we like to pretend.
At causing BRAIN TUMORS!!!
Fewer.
Here are direct links to the paper's download page and the paper itself.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The numbers are easier to understand here:http://news.mit.edu/2016/solving-network-congestion-megamimo-0823
Both Owen Hughes' ibtimes article and the summary say "triple" the speed, which. should be four times the speed.
Three times faster is technically correct, but seems asinine when allowing this kind of English should allow you to say "one time faster" for twice as fast ("my new car can go one time faster than my old car").
**original source (posting to slashdot on mobile - aargh)
http://news.mit.edu/2016/solving-network-congestion-megamimo-0823
Is this anything like the pcell thing that Steve Perlman has been working on?
AC could mean less.
Half a transceiver is not as good as a whole one.
Lesser.
Do current FCC regulations allow for this type of coordinated approach between multiple transmitters? Maybe this is a solution for licensed operation only?
Yes, more transceivers are better than less, thank you MIT.
But only if they're really tightly synchronized.
MIT got them to be tightly synchronized despite being in different boxes in different rooms, rather than all being in the same box, WITHOUT a lot of extra, extra-special, extra-fancy, extra-cost, hardware. This can be built with a bit more off the shelf stuff (maybe the SAME amount of the same off the shelf stuff but with a bit better firmware) and easily folded into the next generation's chips.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
New cellular network designs now have a simple RF portion at the tower without baseband, connected by fiber to a datacenter which operates a unified baseband, effectively turning every tower into one part of a giant phased array radar, turning beams to the right user, and doing things like predictive handoffs and forced handoffs to farther cells that are less loaded. That regional level of awareness only works on regional networks that can have full control of private frequencies in that area though (FCC band fiat).
That this kind of high level network awareness can be pushed into wifi AP's will be nice for corporate and small mesh private networks, but as long as there is overlap between multiple private networks, this is harder to pull off at the suggested maximum performance levels if those other private networks are unaware/uncooperative.
what?
They already did this. It is called MIMO. You can add more streams. It just costs more and requires more PA, LNA, Switches, Connectors, Antennas. The guy who really defined what MIMO is showed mathematically that you can just keep adding channels. There is lots of multipath around you and it can all be used to your advantage if you are a wizard.
Yes, the meanings can be different.
That's the sort of problem you run in to when you believe that talking about 330 in every 100 even makes sense. :ducks for cover ;)
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Fuck, it must be so easy to sit in an academic bubble being regarded as the creme de la creme while actually you're doing very little for humanity.
Doing stuff humanity --> MIT OpenCourseWare
How deos it affect latency? does that become 3.3 times more? will this introduce jitter?
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The linked summary article and this Slashdot summary seem confused about the actual speed gain here. First, a "330% gain" is 4.3x the original speed, not "triple". However in the actual paper the best summary I see is in Figure 13:
"For all nodes in our testbed, JMB deivers a throughput gain between 1.65-2x, with a median gain of 1.8x across SNR".
So, at most about a doubling of speed, and more like a 65-100% range of increased speed.
See subject: That's exactly what came to mind for myself also - "shotgunning" modems as it was called.
APK
P.S.=> It does sound similar enough & yes, that did work so this probably does also... apk
They already did this. It is called MIMO.
We all understand that.
What you're missing is that:
- MIMO works better, over longer distances, when the antennas are more separated. The more the separation, the greater the distance, for a given accuracy of phase.
- But it also requires the radios to be synchronized to within a tiny fraction of a single cycle, so the patterns add up correctly. At 2.5 GHz an entire cycle is one quarter part per BILLION and MIMO reqires more than an order of magnitude better accuracy than that.
When the radios are all in one box, that's easy: You drive them from the same oscillators, and watch your wiring and components.
When they're in different boxes, separated by hundreds of feet or by miles, it's a whole different can of worms. VERY fancy equipment to generate VERY stable signals, extra stuff to estimate their drift (which varies from moment to moment), and it's still a massive pain. You don't get that kind of synchronization between boxes, even in a house, when they're connected by inexpensive commodity cabling.
What these guys did is tweak the protocol to add a tiny synchronizing burst from the designated master transmitter just before each packet. Combined with estimates of the moment-by-moment ongoing drift (computed from reception of the synchronizing bursts from previous packets) they were able to get current commodity-quality hardware to stay adequately synchronized to hold the pattern together for at least the duration of the packet. (I'm betting they can do the same sort of thing with the receivers, too, working off the sync burst from the master transmitter.)
The result is being able to do MIMO with radio/antenna assemblies in different, disconnected, well-separated, boxes, using only packet-quality interconnects and doing synchronization via a small bit of air bandwidth.
That got MIMO over a major hump, in equipment cost, antenna separation, and utility.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At 2.5 GHz an entire cycle is one quarter part per BILLION
Make that 2/5 part per billion.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... and "one cycle per second of error".
I.e. if your clocks are good for one part per million you have a tiny fraction of a millisecond before your pattern comes apart.
Their trick is to resynchronize at the start of every packet, to a reference transmitted by one of the transmitters, so they can get the packet squirted out (or received) while the pattern still holds together, rather than trying to keep the radios in sync constantly despite not being able to wire them together.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's dead simple to synchronize wireless gear on completely different networks, if you so choose. The gear just needs to support it.
GPS input to produce accurate timing, and configurable RF parameters. Polling so that the AP can tell what client to transmit when.
Sure, banging it into 802.11 is a bitch, but even it's been done; take a look at Cambium's ePMP products.
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