Rapidly rising performance requirements on enterprise and carrier networks makes it necessary to squeeze every available megabit per second out of infrastructure gear, which in turn is driving interest in advances in RF technology.

One in particular, so-called , commonly abbreviated as TxBF, is getting much attention, and while this is a potentially useful tool, be careful not to be fooled by vendor claims. As always, the devil is in the details.

BEAMFORMING IN USE:

Before delving in, it's important to have a sense of the basic RF building blocks. Many of the technologies available to help improve radio performance come from the broad category known as "." There are many variations on the theme, but the idea common to all is using more than one antenna on one or both ends of the link to send and/or receive radio signals in a more controlled manner to increase signal quality and throughput.

There's now a whole family of multi-antenna techniques that can be employed to achieve RF performance gains in Wi-Fi. In a properly designed Wi-Fi system, all of these tools can be used in combination to maximize results.