Las Vegas, Nevada — Agere Systems is demonstrating at Comdex this week a wireless LAN technology capable of transmitting data at 162Mb/s in the 5GHz frequency band, three times the throughput achieved from an 802.11a device.
The technology is targeted at home networking and entertainemnt as well as enterprise desktop PC applications.
The research is being done by a group of chip and systems companies at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. "We have shown the proof of concept and are working towards delivering silicon chips and systems. A lot more work needs to be done before a commercial system is available," Roman Polz, marketing director for Agere Systems' Client Systems Group in EMEA, told CommsDesign.com.
Polz said the group hopes to have a solution in silicon ready by 2004. He would not name the other partners in the project, but said other chip companies are participating, as well as companies with systems expertise.
"We are committed to delivering technological advances that will support data intensive applications and drive widespread growth in the wireless LAN industry. This demonstration offers a glimpse of the advances Agere is pursuing to fuel the expansion of wireless data beyond e-mail for business users into home applications such as multimedia entertainment."
Polz said the group believes the technology will be able to compete effectively with wired communications links operating at over 100Mb/s, such as fast Ethernet. Other groups are looking at similar approaches to very fast wireless networking using the 5GHz range, and Polz added the IEEE has already started looking at getting such technology standardized within the 802.11 umbrella.
The demonstration combines Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Together, the two technologies are able to produce a robust wireless data link that can transmit data at more than 162 Mb/s, depending on the total number of antennas deployed. OFDM technology divides the frequency band into numerous parallel sub-channels to guard against interference, while MIMO transmission significantly increases data rates with several antennas transmitting data streams at 54Mb/s and operating in the same frequency.
Data is transmitted with three separate transmitter and receiver antennas. The demonstration shows that the growth in data throughput increases proportionally to the number of antennas.
