We have all experienced the annoyance of trying to access a wireless network in a public place only to find that there are already too many users connected, and the speed is either so slow it’s just not usable, or you can’t even connect at all. Well, thanks to researchers at MIT, that may all be a thing of the past.
A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a Wi-Fi system that has double the range and is three times faster than the traditional Wi-Fi that is used today. The new system is called MegaMIMO 2.0 and is due to enter commercialization soon. MIMO stands for multiple-input-multiple-output and is a technology that allows networks to perform better by combining multiple transmitters and receivers, which allows them to send multiple data signals simultaneously.
Ezzeldin Hamed, Ph.D. student and lead author of the paper states, “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. The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to use the available spectrum efficiently.”
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MegaMimo 2.0 is around the same size as a standard router and consists of a transceiver board, a real-time baseband processing system, and a processor. It allows several routers to work together to transmit data across the same spectrum. This type of system could mean a much better capability could be achieved at high capacity events such as music festivals and sports matches where people are regularly fighting for bandwidth space.
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