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Introduction
Revolutionary 108Mbps Wireless Pre-N Technology
with MIMO
Your Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router uses a new smart antenna
technology called Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). MIMO is a
smart antenna technique that increases speed, range, reliability, and
spectral efficiency for wireless networking systems.
MIMO technology will be used for 802.11n, a standard for
next-generation 802.11 products that boosts throughput to 100Mbps.
The element that makes Belkin’s Pre-N MIMO technology different
from a conventional radio is the use of three antennas and two
simultaneous data streams to deliver wireless transfers around your
home or office. A conventional radio uses one antenna to transmit
a data stream. Belkin’s smart antenna radio (MIMO), on the other
hand, uses three antennas. This design helps combat distortion
and interference. Belkin’s Pre-N MIMO is multidimensional. It builds
on one-dimensional smart antenna technology by simultaneously
transmitting two data streams through the same channel, which
increases wireless capacity.
Think of conventional radio transmission as a two-lane highway. The
speed limit governs the maximum allowable flow of traffic through
that lane. Compared with conventional radios, one-dimensional smart
antenna systems help move traffic through that lane faster and more
reliably—analogous to a four-lane road on which traffic consistently
moves at a rate closer to the speed limit. Belkin’s Pre-N MIMO helps
traffic move at the speed limit and opens more lanes—to become the
superhighway in this example. The rate of traffic flow is multiplied by
the number of lanes that are opened.
During the 1990s, Stanford University researchers Greg Raleigh and
V.K. Jones showed that a characteristic of radio transmission called
multipath, which had previously been considered an impairment to
radio transmission, is actually a gift of nature. Multipath occurs when
signals sent from a transmitter reflect off objects in the environment
and take multiple paths to the receiver. The researchers showed that
multipath can be exploited to multiplicatively increase the capacity of
a radio system.
If each multipath route could be treated as a separate channel, it
would be as if each route were a separate virtual wire. A channel with
multipath then would be like a bundle of virtual wires.
