Lucent Technologies Inc. said scientists at its Bell Labs research and development arm have developed a technology that could boost capacity of some wireless links by a multiple of 10 to 20.
Known as BLAST, the technology may allow fixed wireless technology to near the capability of wired networks, said Lucent. Potential applications include transmitting data between desktop computers, notebook computers and handheld devices and providing phone service to remote and rural areas.
“Technologies that provide a 10-fold improvement in wireless capacity come along once a decade,” said Dan Stanzione, president of Bell Labs. “This is a very significant scientific development with long-term potential impact on our wireless business.”
The BLAST technology is not well-suited for mobile wireless applications because multiple antennas are needed and tracking signal changes in mobile applications would increase the computational complexity, said the company.
BLAST, which stands for Bell Labs Layered Space-Time, was derived from a 50-year-old mathematical theory developed at the company. The end result, said Bell Labs, is that 10 to 20 times more information can be transmitted on the same frequency band by developing new signal-processing techniques.
Bell Labs said the technology takes advantage of a concept that many researchers believed was impossible. The prevailing view, said the company, was that each wireless transmission needs to occupy a separate frequency to avoid interference.
The BLAST technology, however, uses a separate transmitting antenna for each transmission. On the receiving end, separate antennas also are used along with a signal-processing technique that separates the mutually interfering transmissions from each other.
“The breakthrough results prove the feasibility of a technology which leapfrogs what we assumed about the limitations of radio communications,” said Jim Brewington, president of Lucent’s Wireless Networks Group. “While there is still a great deal of applied research required before we apply this discovery, we are very excited about its potential implications for our future wireless systems.”
A prototype of the system used an array of 8 transmit and 12 receive antennas. During the first week of testing, the system achieved capacities of at least 10 times the capacity of fixed wireless loop systems, said the company.
“In the real world of course, scattering will be less favorable than the independent Rayleigh distributed assumption, and it remains to be seen how much capacity is actually available in various propagation environments,” said the company. “Nevertheless, even in relatively poor scattering environments, BLAST should be able to provide significantly higher capacities than conventional architectures.”
