MIMO: The Future Of Wireless

This article is part of a series of quarterly guest columns by Mark Elo, RF Marketing Director, Keithley Instruments, Inc.

Mobile communications, along with the underlying technology that provides voice and data service, is evolving to provide higher data rates in the same frequency spectrum to an ever-growing user base. New communications standards are using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques to maximize throughput and coverage while preserving bandwidth.

MIMO takes spectral efficiency to a new level, but with better spectral efficiency comes a higher level of complexity. MIMO employs more radio carriers to transmit more information, improving spectral efficiency by transmitting all the signals on the same channel occupying the same bandwidth.

This increased complexity poses new testing challenges for design and test engineers.