The IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2014 took place earlier this month in Turkey. This important wireless communications conference featured keynotes on gigabit wireless communications from, among others, Bristol University’s Communication Systems and Networks research group – with the research presented by Professor Andrew Nix (also on Blu Wireless’s advisory board)

It is predicted by that next year the global IP traffic will exceed 83.8 exabytes per month – ie breaking a zettabyte in 2015. Or as Professor Nix put it: “Demand for data access by mobile users is doubling every year and is predicted to continue into the foreseeable future.

Presenting at the conference the team asserted that polarimetric filtering can enable a higher density of active data links. They went on to demonstrate that each millimetre wave link is capable of supporting user rates of up to 7Gbps, and that four simultaneous links could be active in a single room, providing data capacities 100x better than those achieved with current Wi-Fi technologies.

Professor Nix added: “We are fast running out of radio spectrum in the lower frequency bands where cellular and Wi-Fi current operation. As a result we need to exploit high frequencies in future products.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6zsAdeUTuA

This film (produced by Professor Nix’s team) shows output from the University of Bristol’s IEEE 802.11ad (WiGig) simulator. The clip shows the performance of adaptive codebook beamforming algorithms in the presence of 5 moving people.