In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a physical transmission medium. For example, in telecommunications, several telephone calls may be carried using one wire. Multiplexing originated in telegraphy in the 1870s, and is now widely applied in communications. In telephony, George Owen Squier is credited with the development of telephone carrier multiplexing in 1910.
In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two terminals connected to the same transmission medium to transmit over it and to share its capacity. Examples of shared physical media are wireless networks, bus networks, ring networks and point-to-point links operating in half-duplex mode.
Frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) is a channel access method used in some multiple-access protocols. FDMA allows multiple users to send data through a single communication channel, such as a coaxial cable or microwave beam, by dividing the bandwidth of the channel into separate non-overlapping frequency sub-channels and allocating each sub-channel to a separate user. Users can send data through a subchannel by modulating it on a carrier wave at the subchannel's frequency. It is used in satellite communication systems and telephone trunklines.
A cellular network or mobile network is a telecommunications network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless and the network is distributed over land areas called cells, each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver. These base stations provide the cell with the network coverage which can be used for transmission of voice, data, and other types of content. A cell typically uses a different set of frequencies from neighboring cells, to avoid interference and provide guaranteed service quality within each cell.
Beamforming or spatial filtering is a signal processing technique used in sensor arrays for directional signal transmission or reception. This is achieved by combining elements in an antenna array in such a way that signals at particular angles experience constructive interference while others experience destructive interference. Beamforming can be used at both the transmitting and receiving ends in order to achieve spatial selectivity. The improvement compared with omnidirectional reception/transmission is known as the directivity of the array.
Smart antennas are antenna arrays with smart signal processing algorithms used to identify spatial signal signatures such as the direction of arrival (DOA) of the signal, and use them to calculate beamforming vectors which are used to track and locate the antenna beam on the mobile/target. Smart antennas should not be confused with reconfigurable antennas, which have similar capabilities but are single element antennas and not antenna arrays.
The air interface, or access mode, is the communication link between the two stations in mobile or wireless communication. The air interface involves both the physical and data link layers of the OSI model for a connection.
Antenna diversity, also known as space diversity or spatial diversity, is any one of several wireless diversity schemes that uses two or more antennas to improve the quality and reliability of a wireless link. Often, especially in urban and indoor environments, there is no clear line-of-sight (LOS) between transmitter and receiver. Instead the signal is reflected along multiple paths before finally being received. Each of these bounces can introduce phase shifts, time delays, attenuations, and distortions that can destructively interfere with one another at the aperture of the receiving antenna.
In telecommunications, a diversity scheme refers to a method for improving the reliability of a message signal by using two or more communication channels with different characteristics. Diversity is mainly used in radio communication and is a common technique for combatting fading and co-channel interference and avoiding error bursts. It is based on the fact that individual channels experience fades and interference at different, random times, i.e, they are at least partly independent. Multiple versions of the same signal may be transmitted and/or received and combined in the receiver. Alternatively, a redundant forward error correction code may be added and different parts of the message transmitted over different channels. Diversity techniques may exploit the multipath propagation, resulting in a diversity gain, often measured in decibels.
Radio resource management (RRM) is the system level management of co-channel interference, radio resources, and other radio transmission characteristics in wireless communication systems, for example cellular networks, wireless local area networks, wireless sensor systems, and radio broadcasting networks. RRM involves strategies and algorithms for controlling parameters such as transmit power, user allocation, beamforming, data rates, handover criteria, modulation scheme, error coding scheme, etc. The objective is to utilize the limited radio-frequency spectrum resources and radio network infrastructure as efficiently as possible.
Precoding is a generalization of beamforming to support multi-stream transmission in multi-antenna wireless communications. In conventional single-stream beamforming, the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver output. When the receiver has multiple antennas, single-stream beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antennas. In order to maximize the throughput in multiple receive antenna systems, multi-stream transmission is generally required.
Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) is a set of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technologies for multipath wireless communication, in which multiple users or terminals, each radioing over one or more antennas, communicate with one another. In contrast, single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) involves a single multi-antenna-equipped user or terminal communicating with precisely one other similarly equipped node. Analogous to how OFDMA adds multiple-access capability to OFDM in the cellular-communications realm, MU-MIMO adds multiple-user capability to MIMO in the wireless realm.
In radio, cooperative multiple-input multiple-output is a technology that can effectively exploit the spatial domain of mobile fading channels to bring significant performance improvements to wireless communication systems. It is also called network MIMO, distributed MIMO, virtual MIMO, and virtual antenna arrays.
WiMAX MIMO refers to the use of Multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO) technology on WiMAX, which is the technology brand name for the implementation of the standard IEEE 802.16.
In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO, is a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO has become an essential element of wireless communication standards including IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11ac, HSPA+ (3G), WiMAX, and Long Term Evolution (LTE). More recently, MIMO has been applied to power-line communication for three-wire installations as part of the ITU G.hn standard and of the HomePlug AV2 specification.
3G MIMO describes MIMO techniques which have been considered as 3G standard techniques.
Many antennas is a smart antenna technique which overcomes the performance limitation of single user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. In cellular communication, the maximum number of considered antennas for downlink is 2 and 4 to support 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IMT Advanced requirements, respectively. Since the available spectrum band will probably be limited while the data rate requirement will continuously increase beyond IMT-A to support the mobile multimedia services, it is highly probable that the number of transmit antennas at the base station must be increased to 8–64 or more. The installation of many antennas at single base stations introduced many challenges and required development of several high technologies: a new SDMA engine, a new beamforming algorithm and a new antenna array.
WSDMA is a high bandwidth channel access method, developed for multi-transceiver systems such as active array antennas. WSDMA is a beamforming technique suitable for overlay on the latest air-interface protocols including WCDMA and OFDM. WSDMA enabled systems can determine the angle of arrival (AoA) of received signals to spatially divide a cell sector into many sub-sectors. This spatial awareness provides information necessary to maximise Carrier to Noise+Interference Ratio (CNIR) link budget, through a range of digital processing routines. WSDMA facilitates a flexible approach to how uplink and downlink beamforming is performed and is capable of spatial filtering known interference generating locations.
The first smart antennas were developed for military communications and intelligence gathering. The growth of cellular telephone in the 1980s attracted interest in commercial applications. The upgrade to digital radio technology in the mobile phone, indoor wireless network, and satellite broadcasting industries created new opportunities for smart antennas in the 1990s, culminating in the development of the MIMO technology used in 4G wireless networks.
Multiple-input, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) is the dominant air interface for 4G and 5G broadband wireless communications. It combines multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technology, which multiplies capacity by transmitting different signals over multiple antennas, and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which divides a radio channel into a large number of closely spaced subchannels to provide more reliable communications at high speeds. Research conducted during the mid-1990s showed that while MIMO can be used with other popular air interfaces such as time-division multiple access (TDMA) and code-division multiple access (CDMA), the combination of MIMO and OFDM is most practical at higher data rates.
