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It reads like a type of cooperative base station, which means geographically separate antennas are used to transmit signals that add up to a "clean" signal at t
by femto 13y ago
It reads like a type of cooperative base station, which means geographically separate antennas are used to transmit signals that add up to a "clean" signal at the receiving antenna, in which interference is cancelled. That's equivalent to a form of MIMO, in which the antennas are widely distributed in space. Consequently, I'd expect it to be subject to the same limitations as MIMO.
I'm predicting that the breathless claims of "no limit" are based on being the only show in town. As long as the system is controlling every transmission in a volume of space it will do well, and you will be able to add users until you reach the same limits that a MIMO system would hit if it was the only transmitter. Start adding uncontrolled interference, and things will start to degrade.
Maybe the next step, would be for the distributed base stations to use receivers to sample the spectrum. This data could be fed back into the cloud and an attempt be made to predict and cancel the uncontrolled interferers. The FCC (or local equivalent) might take a dim view of this though, if it turned out that the cancellation was effectively jamming other users.
--- Edit.
Just adding, in my experience, if you want to understand the latest radio communications technology, speak to a radio astronomer. When MIMO first came out and people were trying to figure out its limits, it turned out that the radio astronomers already knew the limits, based on their knowledge of large antenna arrays. I'd guess the astronomers would look at this current technology and think "very long baseline interferometry".
- darkmighty 13y agoYou bet this is just like interferometry -- astronomers those days can actually perform it with thousands of miles of separation. Although they're not really forced into the economies required here.