[IDF] New technologies speed up WLAN

It's a well known fact that wireless networks suffer from performance loss when data has to traverse long distances. During their technology showcase, Intell displayed several experimental solutions to this problem. On the image below you see a few damped antennas that simulate a WLAN transmission over a few dozen meters. The first setup shows a normal, direct connection between an access point and a laptop with unsatisfying bandwith. The first way to increase the connection speed is mesh networking, and is demonstrated in the second set-up. A laptop or PC located halfway between the transmitter and receiver collects the data and re-transmits it,  ensuring that the receiver has better reception. Security freaks don't have to be afraid: all this is done in the physical layer of the WLAN controller, meaning that the data isn't accessible for the operating system and isn't decoded. A second technology that can improve the performance of wireless networks is virtual MIMO. By combining the WLAN adapters in two or more PC's that are close to each other, you can benefit from the fact that all antennas receive their own version of the WLAN signal and together can reconstruct the original data.

The screen below shows the results of the demonstration. As you can see, both mesh networking and virtual MIMO provide far better results over long distances. Both technologies are still in the experimental phase and aren't suitable yet to be included in real products.

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