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.