Antenna system helps wireless data load

As data-hungry mobile devices put increasing stress on networks, U.S. researchers say a multi-antenna technology can help keep pace with voracious user demand. Scientists at Rice University in Houston said network capacity can be dramatically increased by allowing cell towers to simultaneously beam signals to more than a dozen customers on the same frequency. Working with colleagues at Bell Labs and Yale University, Rice engineers built a prototype, dubbed Argos, that uses 64 antennas to allow a single wireless base station to communicate directly to 15 users simultaneously with narrowly focused directional beams. "The technical term for this is multi-user beamforming," said Argos project co-leader Lin Zhong, professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science. "The key is to have many antennas, because the more antennas you have, the more users you can serve." "There are all kinds of technical challenges related to synchronization, computational requirements, scaling up and wireless standards," he said. "People have really questioned whether this is practical, so it's significant that we've been able to create a prototype that actually demonstrates that this works." The technology could allow carriers to increase network capacity without building more base stations or having to acquire more frequency spectrum, a Rice release said Thursday.