Dev.SN

Radio Tech Could Halve Bandwidth Needs

posted by Cactus on Thursday February 27 2014, @05:30PM   
from the can-you-hear-me-now? dept.

AnonTechie writes:

According to an article from The Register, a team from Stanford University has patented technology that could halve the bandwidth that a mobile provider needs.

Operating under the name Kumu Networks, they are showcasing tech which they claim would exactly double throughput. Radio equipment (such as mobile phones) would be able to send and receive on the same frequency through a process similar to noise-cancelling headphones; by knowing what a base station is transmitting it can cancel out the information from the very faint signal it receives.

• Re:two things clashed rather in that story. Re:two things clashed rather in that story. (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 28 2014, @06:33AM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday February 28 2014, @06:33AM (#8402) Homepage Journal

  That might make sense. But is obvious, so non-patentable, and I can't believe isn't already in use.
  
  However, that wouldn't make it just a badly written article, it would make the article just plain wrong:
  "radio equipment &#226;&#8364;&#8220; such as that used by mobile telephones " .. "By knowing what a base station is transmitting it can cancel out the information from the very faint signal it receives."
  So we're talking about handsets, not base stations. And by knowing about base stations, *it* (the handset).
  Were it talking about base stations, the 2nd sentence would be "By knowing what it is transmitting, a base station can cancel out ..."
  I can't believe The Reg, even if it's fallen a long way from where it once was, could fuck up things so badly. (Then again, I've not read it for half a decade, it fell so far.)
  
  So I'm still no wiser. Let's just look for NSF grant applications, and see if they're just after free money.

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• Re:two things clashed rather in that story. (Score: 2) by bd on Friday February 28 2014, @07:33AM

  by bd (2773) on Friday February 28 2014, @07:33AM (#8422)

  The article is indeed badly written up. See: http://kumunetworks.com/ [kumunetworks.com]. They have a paper linked directly on their homepage describing what they want to do.

  To quote the paper:

  Why is full duplex hard to realize? When a
  radio transmits a signal, some of that energy is
  heard by its own receiver. Because it is generat-
  ed locally, this unwanted self-interference energy
  is billions of times (100 dB+) stronger than the
  desired receive signal.
  [...]
  Tremendous progress, in both industry and academia, has
  been made in self-interference cancellation
  (SIC), with several groups demonstrating live
  cancellation results in real world environments.

  See figure 2 for an overview, they insert an analog circuit between PA and LNA that cancels interference from the transmitter. While the concept is certainly not novel, their particular interference cancellation circuit may very well be.

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