Monday, July 17, 2017

When Was the Last Time You Worried About Shannon Limits?

With so much new wireless capacity coming in the 5G era, with more advanced radios, better air interfaces, multiplexing (optical and electrical), one might ask whether Shannon’s Law, a big issue in the days of constrained bandwidth, is much of a practical issue anymore.

Shannon’s law, conceived by mathematician Claude Shannon, is a way to calculate the theoretical highest amount of information transmitted by a communications system based on the laws of thermodynamics (noise).

Shannon's Law states that the maximum attainable error-free data speed, in bits per second (bps), is a function of the signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth.

As a practical matter, this is a big deal when bandwidth is limited. It ceases to be much of an issue when bandwidth is plentiful, as will be the case in the 5G era.

Shannon’s law was a bigger issue when wired channels used only copper media, and when mobile bandwidth was constrained. Nobody worries about it in the Wi-Fi context. And one never hears talk of Shannon constraints for optical communication systems.

As the saying goes, given enough bandwidth, very high speeds are possible.

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