Forming RF Beams and Making Wi-Fi Faster On Purpose with 802.11n
Radio communications are subject to unpredictable behavior due to environmental dependencies and various flavors of interference. Conditions can continuously fluctuate on various time-scales due to interference and motion in the environment. The use of unlicensed spectrum further magnifies interference-related variability. Yet it’s possible to effectively mitigate many of these impairments through continuous intelligent selection of system operating parameters and a sufficiently agile antenna system.
New smart Wi-Fi technology has been developed to maximize the performance of video, voice and data applications using standard 802.11 chipsets. Although sometimes considered a “smart antenna” system, this technology is more accurately described as an adaptive real-time system that includes smart antenna technology as one key component.
Smart Wi-Fi antennas rely on the combination of specially designed antenna arrays and software algorithms to perform application-aware, cross-layer optimization of layer 0 (antenna), layer 1 (PHY) and layer 2 (MAC) parameters.
Smart antenna technology was conceived, and has now been developed, to address a Wi-Fi absolute: the RF environment constantly changes. Smart antenna technology alters system parameters in reaction to changing environmental conditions with the goal of maximizing overall application performance. The key aspects of an adaptive real-time system are:
- Optimization criteria
- Adaptation dimensions (controllable system parameters)
- Algorithms used to perform the control modifications
