Corporations are beginning to use wireless LANs to carry voice and video, increasing the need for speed, capacity and reliability. But because WLANs share a finite allocation of frequency spectrum, without increased spectral efficiency they will consume all the available frequency channels and interfere with one another - becoming victims of their own success.

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is a smart antenna technique that increases speed, range, reliability and spectral efficiency for wireless systems. Given the demands that applications are placing on WLANs, MIMO chipsets will figure prominently in new access points and network interface cards.

MIMO is one technology being considered for 802.11n, a standard for next-generation 802.11 that boosts throughput to 100M bit/sec. In the meantime, proprietary MIMO technology improves performance of existing 802.11a/b/g networks.

A conventional radio uses one antenna to transmit a datastream. A typical smart antenna radio, on the other hand, uses multiple antennas. This design helps combat distortion and interference. Examples of multiple-antenna techniques include switched antenna diversity selection, radio-frequency beam forming, digital beam forming and adaptive diversity combining.

These smart antenna techniques are one-dimensional, whereas MIMO is multi-dimensional. It builds on one-dimensional smart antenna technology by simultaneously transmitting multiple datastreams through the same channel, which increases wireless capacity.

You can think of conventional radio transmission as traveling on a one-lane highway. The speed limit governs the maximum allowable flow of traffic through that lane. Compared with conventional radios, one-dimensional smart antenna systems help move traffic through that lane faster and more reliably so that it travels at a rate closer to the speed limit. MIMO helps traffic move at the speed limit and opens more lanes. The rate of traffic flow is multiplied by the number of lanes that are opened.

During the 1990s, Stanford University researchers Greg Raleigh and VK Jones showed that a characteristic of radio transmission called multipath, which had previously been considered an impairment to radio transmission, is actually a gift of nature. Multipath occurs when signals sent from a transmitter reflect off objects in the environment and take multiple paths to the receiver. The researchers showed that multipath can be exploited to multiplicatively increase the capacity of a radio system.