Cisco Cisco Aironet 3700i Access Point Libro blanco

 

 

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Therefore, as with ClientLink and ClientLink 2.0, ClientLink 3.0 beamforming offers high gain, works with every 

802.11a/n/ac client-even 802.11ac clients that do not support standards-based beamforming-and incurs no 

overhead. 

In summary, beamforming is particularly valuable due to the vulnerability of low-antenna-count devices to 

destructive fading. 802.11n offers many incompatible flavors of beamforming, each involving client assistance, and 

the industry has never put its weight behind any one of them. 802.11ac improves the situation by specifying only 

one standardized method, but it does so at the expense of overhead. Thus, beamforming is most practical using 

techniques that don't expect assistance from the client, such as Cisco ClientLink 3.0 and its predecessors. For 

these reasons, ClientLink 3.0 is a key component in Cisco

’s High Density Experience (HDX) solution suite. 

MIMO Equalization 

On the receiving side, the menu of technologies is very short: it includes only MIMO equalization. MIMO 

equalization is the comprehensive means to make best use of the received signal, whether it is transmit 

beamformed, space-time block coded, spatially expanded, or unimproved. For MIMO equalization, having more 

receive chains helps the most, with the biggest gain coming from one extra receive chain, and diminishing returns 

thereafter. Accordingly, a 3x3:3 access point is a solid choice for receiving two spatial streams. So too is a 2x3:2 

access point, since it provides the same number of receive antennas and thus identical gain. 

 

 

 

 

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C11-731150-00  03/14