Artemis pCell: Wireless Reinvented [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Artemis pCell: Wireless Reinvented [pdf]

rearden.com

44 pointstashoecraft12 comments

Here is a video demonstration of pCell. It essentially works by creating a personal cell or "pCell" around your device. Whereas other cell technologies degrade as the number of devices increases, pCell claims to solve that major problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxNntxVWC1g#t=62

Ive been waiting for something to happen with the PCell for about 1.5 years now. Their facebook, twitter and homepage has been stagnant.

Ive posted and searched, nothing new has happened since early 2014. Now something! I just want to work now and to help me with my shite signal.

How do you get your own Personal Cell when on a train and you are crowded again many others? Degrades to as bad the status quo?

Page 40: "This aggregate capacity can be divided among any number of users, using TDMA and OFDMA." It's something like (link rate)*(# of antennas within range)/(# of phones)

I'll believe it when I see it. At this point it's just vapourware.

I guess that's why they're doing a demo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9099467

You don't believe in Artemis or you don't believe in beamforming? Here's a patent from 1954 about beamforming: http://www.google.com/patents/US2670443

Steve Jobs was born the next year. Cell phones were invented 18 years later. In the mean time, this tech has grown more popular, which is a pretty good indication that it works.

You want proof of a product? Search for "warship" on google images, click on your favorite one, and look for flat, slightly off-color octagon-ish panels on the side. Those are beam-forming radars. They are flat because they use the same trick to form a "virtual dish" which can be aimed instantaneously in any direction above the plane by altering the phase delays in its components. You can't slew a physical dish back and forth to point at 20 different targets a second, but you can use the beamforming trick to do that without problem. Same trick works for wifi and cell phones.

Don't like ships? I don't blame you, I get seasick. Search for "radar truck" and look for the flat ones.

You want more proof? Here are radio astronomers using the trick to get better angular resolution in the radio spectrum: http://www.upv.es/antenas/Catalogo_fotos/radioastronomia/loo...

"I'll only believe it if it's in a book." Amazon has 2,573 hits for "phased array" and the first few pages all look relevant.

"I'll only believe it it's in the academic literature." Google scholar has 430,000 hits for "phased array."

"I'll only believe it if google does it." Instant search seems to know about it too: https://www.google.com/search?q=phased+array

"I'll only believe it if the NSA does it." Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FLR-9

"I'll only believe it if Snowden leaks it." I'm too lazy to search his docs for incidental references to it, but here is Iran doing it, and the NSA probably likes Iran about as much as they like Snowden, right? http://www.businessinsider.com/iran-displays-indigenous-rada...

"I'll only believe it if I can watch a guy talk about it." I'm pretty sure this guy worked at an intercept place that used one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh9txt1TGt8

"But how does it work?" http://www.radartutorial.eu/06.antennas/Phased%20Array%20Ant...

Network MIMO isn't rudimentary beamforming and I think it's fair to say that it isn't obvious that it works in practice.

True, but the theory behind MIMO and DIDO (i.e. pCell) is the same. The challenge is overcoming the synchronization and timing problems introduced by having antennas situated miles apart and connected over the Internet, rather than a few centimeters apart on the same circuit board. People had similar concerns about cloud gaming, but OnLive (which, note, also came from Rearden Labs) and Gaikai proved it could be done surprisingly well. Now that I think about it, Rearden may already have gathered some highly relevant expertise from their experience with OnLive.

Also, Rearden has been claiming for some time now that they have working demos. I doubt they're making that up. I fear, however, that Artemis may meet a similar fate as OnLive: a technological marvel that unfortunately fails in the market.

All of Perlman's companies seemed over-engineered considering the immaturity of their respective markets. I guess that's his curse.

In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice.

I'm usually very sceptical what it comes to claims this amazing. But everything here makes sense. You can definitely do constructive interference at desired locations, it's just matter of computing power. If you have n+1 base station antennas, you should be able to support n simultaneous data streams at the same frequency assuming insignificant path losses.

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