MIMO

Although TRLabs didn't pioneer these technologies, we were using and experimenting with them long before they became widely available in commercial products. For vendor sponsors, our goal is to understand the emerging technologies and produce new ideas and trained students just as technologies are maturing, with the intent of giving our sponsors the competitive advantage when the technology goes mainstream. If the sponsor is a carrier, we should be able to help forecast the effects of new technologies on their future business and give realistic evaluations of the exaggerated claims that usually accompany new wireless technologies. For example: How will MIMO improve the effectiveness of your future products? What capacity improvement is realistic? What are the disadvantages?

Currently the hottest area of research in wireless systems is multiple-input, multiple-output antenna systems. The reason is that it promises huge capacity and data rate gains by using multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver. Our past research has been to measure and understand the MIMO channel, especially for wideband signals, and determine what the real capacity is. Now the research will be to develop and implement practical MIMO transmitters and receivers that can operate at close to the measured capacity. We will start with the basic 2x2 antenna case and progress to higher level MIMO such as 4x4.