Wireless communications has been around for a century, and for much of that time, engineers have labored to overcome the nastiness of multipath interference. If you count yourself among the pre-cable generation, you've experienced multipath video interference, manifested in ghosted images on your TV screen. If you're younger, your multipath experience might include dropped cell-phone calls or dropped data packets on your company's Wi-Fi network. Multipath occurs when signals reflect off solid objects, resulting in multiple instances of a transmitted radio wave arriving at a receiver at slightly different times. These signals can cancel each other out, but more often the effects are more subtle. A number of technologies have been developed to mitigate multipath, but none represented a breakthrough—until MIMO.
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