Boffin breakthrough doubles Wi-Fi speed
A team of researchers has developed a technology that has the potential to double the speed of wireless radios – such as those used by Wi-Fi – by allowing signals to be received and transmitted simultaneously.
"Textbooks say you can't do it," said Stanford University assistant professor Philip Levis when announcing the breakthrough. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed."
"Designing radios that can receive and transmit at the same time was thought to be generally impossible," says fellow assistant professor and team member Sachin Katti in a video accompanying the announcement. The Stanford team – Levis, Katti, and three Stanford graduate students – developed a deceptively simple method to support full-duplex radio transmission and reception. Their idea was so straightforward, Levis says, that one researcher told the team it couldn't work because the idea was so obvious that that someone else must have already tried it and failed.
