Published on Jun 05, 2023
The explosive growth of both the wireless industry and the Internet is creating a huge market opportunity for wireless data access. Limited Internet access, at very low speeds, is already available as an enhancement to some existing cellular systems. However those systems were designed with purpose of providing voice services and at most short messaging, but not fast data transfer.
Traditional wireless technologies are not very well suited to meet the demanding requirements of providing very high data rates with the ubiquity, mobility and portability characteristics of cellular systems. Increased use of antenna arrays appears to be the only means of enabling the type of data rates and capacities needed for wireless Internet and multimedia services.
While the deployment of base station arrays is becoming universal it is really the simultaneous deployment of base station and terminal arrays that can unleash unprecedented levels of performance by opening up multiple spatial signaling dimensions.
Theoretically, user data rates as high as 2 Mb/sec will be supported in certain environments, although recent studies have shown that approaching those might only be feasible under extremely favorable conditions-in the vicinity of the base station and with no other users competing for band width. Some fundamental barriers related to the nature of radio channel as well as to the limited bandwidth availability at the frequencies of interest stand in the way of high data rates and low cost associated with wide access.
In wireless systems, radio waves do not propagate simply from transmit antenna to receive antenna, but bounce and scatter randomly off objects in environment. This scattering is known as multipath as it result in multiple copies of the transmitted signals arriving at the receiver via different scattered paths. Multipath has always been regarded as impairment, because the images arrive at the receiver at slightly different times and thus can interfere destructively, canceling each other out.
However recent advances in information theory have shown that, with simulations use of antenna arrays at both base station and terminal, multipath interference can be not only mitigated, but actually exploited to establish multiple parallel channels that operate simultaneously and in the same frequency band. Based on this fundamental idea, a class of layered space-time architecture was proposed and labeled BLAST.
