Throughput multiplication of wireless LANs for multimedia services: SDMA protocol design

Since the radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth allocated for wireless communications is a diminishing resource, wireless access to local area networks (LANs) has fundamental limitation on throughput and communication delays. With exponentially growing demand for multimedia services, this limitation becomes a bottleneck for expanding the wireless network capabilities. We exploit another resource, i.e., space, and design a new space division multiple access (SDMA) protocol to achieve throughput multiplication. The basic idea behind the SDMA protocol is that it exploits spatial diversity among different terminals to selectively transmit and receive signals in the same time slot and same frequency band. The only new requirements of this new protocol are an array of multiple antennas installed at a base station and advanced signal processing software to process the received data. The feasibility of the SDMA protocol is demonstrated by preliminary experimental studies.