Multi-Antenna Technology to Feed Data-Hungry Smartphones

Demand for wireless data is projected to increase 18-fold in the next five years due to the growing popularity of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. To help meet the challenge, wireless researchers from Rice University, Bell Labs, and Yale University are creating Argos - a multi-antenna technology that aims to dramatically increase network capacity by allowing cell towers to simultaneously serve dozens of customers on the same frequency. The 64-antenna Argos prototype is capable of simultaneously beaming signals to 15 users on the same frequency.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] Argos it's named after a Greek creature with 100 eyes analogous to the antennas Argos is a new wireless technology which leverages a large number of antennas this has a number of benefits including a huge power gain but more importantly you're sending to many users simultaneously so you're getting a huge multiplexing gain so overall this

00:00:25 increases the network capacity and the Energy Efficiency of the network so for the end user this would mean much much higher bandwidth and much less power so your battery would last longer and you would have much faster speeds on the internet so the white dis mounted on the front are antennas and the more antennas you have the more power gains and capacity gains you can get there's a

00:00:45 technique called beam forming and essentially what we're doing is we're sending a physical beam so it's like a using all of these antennas to create a very very directional antenna focused only on the user that you want to send data to and we can do this simultaneously do many users so we creating each of these narrow beams we can send to each user without

00:01:03 interfering with the other users and this gives us a huge capacity gain so this is an an awesome project that has a lot of potential and so far we've shown that you can get these awesome gains at the physical layer but there's a lot a lot of other problems that we have to solve before this will meet any sort of cellular product sort of specification and so this requires especially on

00:01:24 cellular levels we're having to switch the frequency usage on top of that there's a lot of practical and logistical considerations I mean not only the standards and all of that but even just being a l Mount this large array on Towers presents difficulties such as wind loading power consumption and so on and the sheer size and cost of this array kind of prevents it from

00:01:43 initially being used in the home situation for Wi-Fi eventually we hope as the radio shrink may be feasible for Enterprise networks and maybe eventually home use but it certainly has a great potential of solving the bandwidth crunch for cellular networks in the next 5 or 10 years