Wireless Networks Can Now Be Truly Wireless

This research has been underway for a couple of years at the university.  Now they are launching collaboration with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories to test new technology.  During the year the technology will be tested in Vänern House at Karlstad University and after that in a real urban environment in Berlin.  These tests will primarily involve IP telephony.

“We are researching entirely wireless connection points, or Mesh nodes, that is, the points where users connect their computers to the Internet,” says Andreas Kassler.

The idea behind the new technology is that the nodes communicate with each other instead of each node having to have its own connection to the Internet.  Today, however, this technology poses a problem, since the capacity of the networks drops rapidly.  The connection nodes have a hard time communicating with several nodes at the same time.  This problem will be eradicated by the research being pursued by Andreas Kassler’s team. 

Karlstad University has one of the first experimental environments in Sweden in which each node can use several network cards and communicate on different frequencies simultaneously.  This means that the capacity is the same throughout the network.

Telephone and Internet operators are interested in this technology since it makes it less costly to build networks.  This should ultimately lead to lower costs for users, according to Andreas Kassler.