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A new agreement between the Wi-Fi Alliance and AT4 wireless will see the latter provide testing services to assess the fair coexistence of LTE with Wi-Fi in unlicensed spectrum devices.
The project will seek to determine the extent of LTE interference with Wi-Fi equipment operating in the same bands and whether this violates fairness indicators.
Edgar Figueroa, president and chief executive of the Wi-Fi Alliance, commented: “It is critical that LTE devices operating in unlicensed spectrum exhibit fair coexistence behavior with billions of Wi-Fi products in use around the world.
"Wi-Fi Alliance is leading a multi-industry effort to ensure LTE-U’s fair coexistence with Wi-Fi through testing. Establishing independent test organisations to execute the coexistence test regimen is an important part of our effort."
Fernando Hardasmal, managing director at AT4 Wireless said the company is proud to be involved in the testing process. He added that radio coexistence has become a highly important issue due to the increasing number of radio technologies that are now capable of working in multiple environments.
AT4 wireless will utilise a performance test tool that collects data on a number of key performance indicators, such as throughput, latency and jitter.
The organisation has partnered with the Wi-Fi Alliance as an authorised testing laboratory since 2004 and provides services for all Wi-Fi Alliance programmes for the certification of Wi-Fi devices.
According to the Alliance, some 2.5 billion Wi-Fi devices were sold over the course of 2015, with cumulative shipments forecast to reach 28 billion by 2020. There are currently close to five million Wi-Fi hotspots across the world, with more than 450 million households utilising a Wi-Fi network. With Wi-Fi use only set to grow, establishing clear spectrum policy will be vital to ensure high performance levels.
At the end of August, it was reported that researchers in the US have developed new technology that could improve Wi-Fi speeds by as much as 330 per cent. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that by coordinating multiple routers at the same time, greatly enhanced data transfer speeds could be achieved.
Ezzeldin Hamed, a PhD student and leader of the research, stated: "In today's wireless world, you can’t solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another. The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum."
Image from Yuri_Arcurs via iStock
