Beamforming: The Best WiFi You’ve Never Seen
Table of contents
- 1. Open-Mouthed Amazement
- 2. Beamforming Basics
- 3. Inside On-Chip Phased Arrays
- 4. The Client That Could Be
- 5. On-Chip Challenges
- 6. Ruckus And On-Antenna Phased Arrays
- 7. Can You Hear Me Now?
- 8. Test Gear: Ruckus 7962
- 9. Test Gear: Cisco Aironet 1142 And Aruba AP125
You should have seen my wife’s face when she found me glued to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. “No, honey, come here!” I said, my face aglow with the bikini-clad pixels of Tyra and Heidi Klum. “You’ve got to see this!”
Arms crossed. Pursed lips. “Mm-hmm. Yes?”
I pointed at the laptop on the counter in front of me. “Not the models. The video. It’s high-def with a 19.2 megabits per second stream rate. Looks perfect, like HDTV, right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now turn around.” I pointed at the plasma screen on the wall pulling a different part of the same video, a second stream at 18.4 Mbps, through our Xbox 360 with an attached 802.11n bridge. “That’s almost 40 megabits streaming over WiFi. I’ve never even been able to do one stream before, and now we’ve got two!”
My wife looked at the screens, looked back to me, and shrugged. “OK, then. I’ll leave you and the girls to it. Have fun.”
She walked away and slammed the front door. I don’t think she actually cared if I was having fun. Strange. Clearly, she didn’t understand that something amazing had fallen into my lap. Actually, let me rephrase that. Something incredible had happened to my network. With an access point clear across the house, transmitting through one floor and three or four walls, coping with literally a dozen interfering WiFi networks surrounding the house, I was getting wireless network performance unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
This was my first experience with beamforming, something I’d only seen vague mention of on long-term WiMAX roadmaps. But here it was in an 802.11n access point from a company I’d never heard of, and it blew away everything I’d ever seen a wireless product do before.
Interested? Then let’s dig in. I may not have runway models to offer you, but I still think you’ll be impressed.
Tyra is an over confident wh0r3 and is not hot.
You sir are an idiot
just what we need, more retarded failnoobs clogging up the airwaves with useless braindead movieclips...yaay
wow....this owns
This article started up pretty good with lots of technical data and the beamforming technology in theory but after that the goodness stopped.
1.You cannot compare two products by testing them with a in-house developed software. It's like testing ATI vs nVIDIA with nvidia made benchmark.
2.If you do something get it done, don't just go with half measures. I don't care if you didn't have time. You should have planned this from the beginning. The tests are incomplete, and the article is filled with crap of Rukus and Cisco.
In defense of your wife, you didn't HAVE to use that particular channel to view all the "detail".
@Mr_Man: With a name like yours, I'd think that you'd sympathize with Chris a bit more
Unless (Mr_Man == I likes men) 
awesome article! Thanks for exposing us to this great technology
Both Tyra and Heidi have personal issues and would be pretty difficult friend/mate.
The network idea sounds better. I couldn’t get my 10 feet g network to transmit a tenth as much as my wired network without it dropping.
There's one question that I think was not covered by the article. Can a beamformaing AP can sustain the above numbers on two different clients? Let's say we take the UDP test at 5 GHz. The result shows 7.3 Mb/s. If we had two clients at opposite sides of the AP doing the same test, would we have 7.3 Mb/s for each test or would the bandwidth be sliced in 2?
The numbers so far are astonishing, but are they realistic in a multi-client environnement? That's something I'd like to know!
There is so much invisible to understand in wireless technology!
You can of course get the same effect by having better antenna on both ends of the network. This would increase gain which would improve signal to noise ratio, which would improve data flow speeds. You would also get the same effect by boost in the power but that could get you in trouble with the law.
I'm not an expert on beamforming, but I'm surprised that it is useful at these frequencies. After all, the wavelength at 2.4 GHz is ~12 cm (~5 inches). That means that the pockets of constructive interference (the beam) are very small. Moving the receiver a few inches should make a big difference.
Are you sure the differences you are seeing aren't simply due to higher power output? Couldn't the same improvements be obtained with a directional antenna like a Yagi?
So far quite an interesting technology. Its nice to know that at someone in the wireless world is striving to make something innovative!
When all the major players sell items that look almost the same, act similarly, and perform almost the same, there is something wrong with the industry.
Beam forming technology have been for a long time, but they are mostly used in military equipments. Phased Array radars, Synthetic Aperture Radar, Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar, Plane Array Antenna and antenna for data link. Most consumer products still use Yagi or disk antenna. Cost is a major issue in the application. Military don't care that much about the cost.
sounds nice - but i won't get excited until it's available at Best Buy!
One niggling concern, I felt reasonably safe with the unfocused cloud of RF surrounding me wherever I go, but I am not so sure about the tightly focused beam that the Ruckus provides. What happens to the poor joe who sits directly in the path of such a beam for 8 hours a day?
In defense of your wife, you didn't HAVE to use that particular channel to view all the "detail".
LOL! True enough. It honestly was a reference file I had on hand for such testing situations. Angelini obviously showed a bit more wisdom in his choice of in-house test content.
sounds nice - but i won't get excited until it's available at Best Buy! One niggling concern, I felt reasonably safe with the unfocused cloud of RF surrounding me wherever I go, but I am not so sure about the tightly focused beam that the Ruckus provides. What happens to the poor joe who sits directly in the path of such a beam for 8 hours a day?
My absolutely unqualified opinion is "probably nothing." While the conditions are somewhat different, you might want to read a Tech Myths column segment I did over on Tom's Guide that touches on this issue. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/decibe [...] 38-10.html
There's one question that I think was not covered by the article. Can a beamformaing AP can sustain the above numbers on two different clients? Let's say we take the UDP test at 5 GHz. The result shows 7.3 Mb/s. If we had two clients at opposite sides of the AP doing the same test, would we have 7.3 Mb/s for each test or would the bandwidth be sliced in 2?The numbers so far are astonishing, but are they realistic in a multi-client environnement? That's something I'd like to know!
Excellent question, and one I hope to dive into in a later article. For now, I can only give you the anecdote on my opening page, running the same HD stream to two clients. Ruckus states that BeamFlex can sustain a 50 Mbps minimum per access point. Do the math on your client streams accordingly, I suppose.
LOL! True enough. It honestly was a reference file I had on hand for such testing situations. Angelini obviously showed a bit more wisdom in his choice of in-house test content.
Honestly honey, it's just a reference file, I swear it's not porn. I challenge you to find HD streaming content from the internet that highlights the subtle nuance of flesh tones.