6 ms·

Still seems hard to believe you can scale up the math and deal with intermittent changes in the RF (e.g. cars passing by) but I guess now we'll find out if it w

Still seems hard to believe you can scale up the math and deal with intermittent changes in the RF (e.g. cars passing by) but I guess now we'll find out if it works.

amalag 13y ago
They mention a datacenter in the article, but seems like a perfect application for custom hardware.
- lutusp 13y ago
  The point of the data center is to compute, on the fly, unique phase solutions for moving devices being served by multiple antennas, and to compute new solutions as the devices move. It's a huge workload, perfect for a modern, high-speed multiprocessor system to tell the cell-tower antennas which phase delay to apply to (a) each antenna, (b) each data packet, and (c) each device in a separate, changing location.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    You don't need a "datacenter" per se, but you need a private control plane shared by the devices so that they can pass relevant information to each other. As long as the sites are interconnected and have some sort of addressing that is tied to their geographic location (i.e. devices know very quickly who their neighbor devices are by address), a central datacenter is not necessary. TL;DR You need a shared bus for passing geospatial data between geographically local devices.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > You don't need a "datacenter" per se ... Perhaps, I'm just using the language from the linked article: "To work properly, a company backing the pCell technology would need to build out a large data center in addition to deploying the transmitters. It’s in the data center where servers constantly crunch away on the algorithms that form the unique wireless stream aimed at each device."
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        I apologize if you felt like I was correcting you. The article isn't very tech heavy.
msandford 13y ago
It's not terribly difficult provided that you've got enough directional antennas in your base station. If you do, then every receiver is independent. In other words it could very well scale as O(n), n = the number of devices.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > It's not terribly difficult provided that you've got enough directional antennas in your base station. This scheme doesn't rely on directional antennas, it relies on computing an optimal set of phase solutions for multiple antennas to maximize reception quality. Each antenna is an ordinary omnidirectional dipole, but several of them working together, with calculated phase delays, provide a kind of directionality if you want to think about it that way.
  - msandford 13y ago
    How do you know it doesn't rely on directional antennas in addition to the multi-phase solution? If I were trying to do something like this I would ABSOLUTELY use multiple directional antennas in each base station AND phase things appropriately. I don't mean trying to make a ball of yagis or other narrow beam antennas. But at the very least try and take advantage of splitting a base station into multiple (2, 4, 8, etc) slices. I can't see how that would hurt performance (though it would probably make things more expensive) and it would certainly make it easier to get more bandwidth. Here's an excerpt from the patent: [0120]FIG. 3 provides additional detail of one embodiment of the Base Station 200 and Client Devices 203-207 shown in FIG. 2. For the purposes of simplicity, the Base Station 300 is shown with only three antennas 305 and only three Client Devices 306-308. It will be noted, however, that the embodiments of the invention described herein may be implemented with a virtually unlimited number of antennas 305 (i.e., limited only by available space and noise) and Client Devices 306-308. Obviously I haven't studied the patent in detail but that does sound to me like there are multiple antennas per base station.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > How do you know it doesn't rely on directional antennas in addition to the multi-phase solution? Because: 1. The article claims it can use the existing cell tower system. 2. Cell tower antennas are simple dipoles, not directional antennas. > If I were trying to do something like this I would ABSOLUTELY use multiple directional antennas in each base station AND phase things appropriately. Yes, that would improve the performance, but this would make it a hard sell to cell companies who are trying to reduce the cost of their installed equipment. Also, to use directional antennas in a high-speed dynamic network, for a given beam width N, you would need 360/N directional antennas. For a beam width of 30 degrees, you would need 12 antennas where one exists now, and you would need a way to switch between antennas on each transmitted packet to multiple served devices. That would be a nightmare. > Obviously I haven't studied the patent in detail but that does sound to me like there are multiple antennas per base station. Yes, the basic idea requires multiple antennas whose relative phase can be adjusted. But not directional antennas.
MaysonL 13y ago
Think phased-array radar on steroids.

Still seems hard to believe you can scale up the math and deal with intermittent changes in the RF (e.g. cars passing by) but I guess now we'll find out if it works.

amalag 13y ago

They mention a datacenter in the article, but seems like a perfect application for custom hardware.

lutusp 13y ago
The point of the data center is to compute, on the fly, unique phase solutions for moving devices being served by multiple antennas, and to compute new solutions as the devices move. It's a huge workload, perfect for a modern, high-speed multiprocessor system to tell the cell-tower antennas which phase delay to apply to (a) each antenna, (b) each data packet, and (c) each device in a separate, changing location.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  You don't need a "datacenter" per se, but you need a private control plane shared by the devices so that they can pass relevant information to each other. As long as the sites are interconnected and have some sort of addressing that is tied to their geographic location (i.e. devices know very quickly who their neighbor devices are by address), a central datacenter is not necessary. TL;DR You need a shared bus for passing geospatial data between geographically local devices.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > You don't need a "datacenter" per se ... Perhaps, I'm just using the language from the linked article: "To work properly, a company backing the pCell technology would need to build out a large data center in addition to deploying the transmitters. It’s in the data center where servers constantly crunch away on the algorithms that form the unique wireless stream aimed at each device."
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      I apologize if you felt like I was correcting you. The article isn't very tech heavy.

msandford 13y ago

It's not terribly difficult provided that you've got enough directional antennas in your base station. If you do, then every receiver is independent. In other words it could very well scale as O(n), n = the number of devices.

lutusp 13y ago
> It's not terribly difficult provided that you've got enough directional antennas in your base station. This scheme doesn't rely on directional antennas, it relies on computing an optimal set of phase solutions for multiple antennas to maximize reception quality. Each antenna is an ordinary omnidirectional dipole, but several of them working together, with calculated phase delays, provide a kind of directionality if you want to think about it that way.
- msandford 13y ago
  How do you know it doesn't rely on directional antennas in addition to the multi-phase solution? If I were trying to do something like this I would ABSOLUTELY use multiple directional antennas in each base station AND phase things appropriately. I don't mean trying to make a ball of yagis or other narrow beam antennas. But at the very least try and take advantage of splitting a base station into multiple (2, 4, 8, etc) slices. I can't see how that would hurt performance (though it would probably make things more expensive) and it would certainly make it easier to get more bandwidth. Here's an excerpt from the patent: [0120]FIG. 3 provides additional detail of one embodiment of the Base Station 200 and Client Devices 203-207 shown in FIG. 2. For the purposes of simplicity, the Base Station 300 is shown with only three antennas 305 and only three Client Devices 306-308. It will be noted, however, that the embodiments of the invention described herein may be implemented with a virtually unlimited number of antennas 305 (i.e., limited only by available space and noise) and Client Devices 306-308. Obviously I haven't studied the patent in detail but that does sound to me like there are multiple antennas per base station.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > How do you know it doesn't rely on directional antennas in addition to the multi-phase solution? Because: 1. The article claims it can use the existing cell tower system. 2. Cell tower antennas are simple dipoles, not directional antennas. > If I were trying to do something like this I would ABSOLUTELY use multiple directional antennas in each base station AND phase things appropriately. Yes, that would improve the performance, but this would make it a hard sell to cell companies who are trying to reduce the cost of their installed equipment. Also, to use directional antennas in a high-speed dynamic network, for a given beam width N, you would need 360/N directional antennas. For a beam width of 30 degrees, you would need 12 antennas where one exists now, and you would need a way to switch between antennas on each transmitted packet to multiple served devices. That would be a nightmare. > Obviously I haven't studied the patent in detail but that does sound to me like there are multiple antennas per base station. Yes, the basic idea requires multiple antennas whose relative phase can be adjusted. But not directional antennas.

MaysonL 13y ago

Think phased-array radar on steroids.