The University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Operating System

SU-MIMO vs. MU-MIMO

 

If you’ve been in the market recently for a new router, gateway, or access point, you may have noticed the terms “SU-MIMO” or “MU-MIMO” being tossed around as a hot new feature. But what exactly do these terms means? And how important are these to making my wireless better?

To understand how these new wireless technologies work, it’s important to first understand how wireless traditionally works. Wireless, whether it be in a home, dorm, or office is a shared medium, many different wireless devices are all “talking”, sending and receiving packets of data, to a single piece of wireless antenna hardware at a time. Traditionally, access points could only send or receive packets to one device at a time. The wireless hardware can send and receive packets so fast however, that many times you may not even notice a slowdown when loading your favorite website or watching a Netflix stream, even when it’s shared among others in a household.

However, when you start to add more users on a single wireless antenna, and/or add latency specific network packets such as a skype call, or loading an online multiplayer games, in which packets are very dependent to be sent and received with urgency, or otherwise the user might encounter “lag”. This sort of lag occurs when packets aren’t being able to be sent or received from the devices fast enough, as the hardware can only send or receive to one device at a time, and has to switch around from device to device sending or receiving their packets, while others are put on a shared waitlist.

In come SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO, a way to help alleviate lag on an overcrowded network. The MIMO part stands for Multi-Input, Multi-Output, with the SU and MU standing for Single-User and Multi-User respectively. These wireless standards work to alleviate the traditional wireless bottleneck, the ability to only send or receive packets from one device at a time. With SU-MIMO, a single device can now both send AND receive packets at a time, with MU-MIMO being able to send and receive data from multiple devices at a time, effectively working to cut down on the waitlist to send data to devices requesting data on a network.

MU-MIMO is the future of wireless technology: it costs very little as a standard to implement, and has a noticeable impact on a clogged network without having to modify anything else. Devices now must wait a lot shorter of a time to get and send their packets, and overall creates a more efficient wireless network. You will have to make sure your next home or enterprise’s installation include support for MU-MIMO wireless equipment, but it should also be noted that it won’t solve all your problems. Wireless is and always will be a shared medium, they can be dependent on others factors such as wavelength congestion, interference, and pure overcrowded-ness if your equipment was not rated for the workload.