Beamforming: The Best WiFi You’ve Never Seen
Ruckus And On-Antenna Phased Arrays
Fortunately, an omnidirectional antenna is not the only way to obtain 360 degrees of wireless coverage. If you had enough directional antennas with overlapping cones of coverage, you could effectively cover 360 degrees. But the beauty of this sort of setup is that you don’t have to run all of those antennas all of the time. Once you get a fix on the direction of the client, you simply have to determine which set of antennas (two or more) will create an optimal beam to the desired point.
Keep in mind that this isn’t always a straight line. The client could be around a corner, and the better signal might be had by bouncing the stream off of a couple of walls rather than trying to punch straight through the obstructions. Or conditions may change. Doors can open and close. People move around. Someone might turn on a microwave oven and spew interference all over the spectrum. All of these things can alter signal paths and hamper traffic.
Traditionally, the only way an access point had to deal with dropped packets or CRC errors (corruption) was to drop transmit speeds. The PHY rate might ratchet down from 54 Mbps to 48, then 36, and so on until the client started acknowledging packet receipts. The slower the speed, though, the longer the radio stays on for a given data burst, and the longer the radio is on, the more susceptible it is to interference. So when conditions turn bad, you can get into this negative feedback loop that just slaughters performance. An intelligent antenna system will both dynamically change the beam orientation to a more optimal direction as well as forestall reducing the PHY rate until absolutely necessary.
Communication between the AP and client helps with these improvements, but it’s not strictly essential. The bulk of optimization gets done by the access point. In the tests that follow, we did not use a Ruckus client adapter for two reasons. First, Ruckus told us that 75% of the performance improvement seen above standard 802.11n comes from the access point, so adding in a proprietary client would only yield a small benefit. Second, relatively few real-life scenarios can dictate the client. It’s not like you can say, “Feel free to use my wireless LAN, but just make sure you use an XYZ adapter.”
Ruckus uses “on-antenna” beamforming, a technology developed and patented by Ruckus under the brand name “BeamFlex.” Essentially, BeamFlex uses an array of antennas and analyzes every packet to assess signal performance. Depending on the configuration, a BeamFlex access point can configure into any of thousands of possible antenna signal combinations. The access point monitors connections in real-time and modifies beams on the fly to fit dynamic conditions. Keeping with the MRC legacy, antennas that need signal boosting get boosted while those that don’t are attenuated. This results in up to a 10 dB signal gain along the target beam as well as a -17 dB interference rejection in the direction of backlobes.
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pirateboy just what we need, more retarded failnoobs clogging up the airwaves with useless braindead movieclips...yaayReply -
bucifer This article started up pretty good with lots of technical data and the beamforming technology in theory but after that the goodness stopped.Reply
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. -
Mr_Man In defense of your wife, you didn't HAVE to use that particular channel to view all the "detail".Reply -
@Mr_Man: With a name like yours, I'd think that you'd sympathize with Chris a bit more :P Unless (Mr_Man == I likes men) :DReply
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Pei-chen Both Tyra and Heidi have personal issues and would be pretty difficult friend/mate.Reply
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.
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zak_mckraken 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?Reply
The numbers so far are astonishing, but are they realistic in a multi-client environnement? That's something I'd like to know!