BLAST

BLAST is a wireless communications technique which uses multi-element antennas at both transmitter and receiver to permit transmission rates far in excess of those possible using conventional approaches.

In wireless systems, radio waves do not propagate simply from transmit antenna to receive antenna, but bounce and scatter randomly off objects in the environment. This scattering known as multipath, as it results in multiple copies (“images”) of the transmitted sign arriving at the receiver via different scattered paths. In conventional wireless system multipath represents a significant impediment to accurate transmission, because the image arrive at the receiver at slightly different times and can thus interfere destructively, canceling each other out. For this reason, multipath is traditionally viewed as a serious impairment. Using the BLAST approach however, it is possible to exploit multipath, that is, to use the scattering characteristics of the propagation environment to enhance, rather than degrade transmission accuracy by treating the multiplicity of scattering paths as separate parallel sub channels.