Throughput multiplication of wireless LANs: spread spectrum with SDMA
Garret T. Okamoto, Guanghan Xu · 2002
The bandwidth allocated for wireless LANs in the IEEE 802.11 standard is limited and the overall throughput is limited for multimedia services because base stations grant each node air time in a sequential manner. With exponentially growing demand for multimedia services, this limitation becomes a bottleneck for expanding wireless network capabilities. In this paper, we exploit another resource, i.e., space, and design a new spread spectrum space-division-multiple-access (SS-SDMA) protocol to achieve throughput multiplication and significant reduction of communication delays. The basic idea behind the SS-SDMA protocol is that it exploits spatial diversity among different terminals to selectively transmit and receive signals in the same time period and frequency band.