History of MIMO

The earliest ideas in this field go back to work by A.R. Kaye and D.A. George (1970) and W. van van Etten (1975, 1976).

Jack Winters at Bell Laboratories and Jack Salz at Bell Labs published several papers on beamforming related applications in the mid eighties 1984, 1986.

Arogyaswami Paulraj and Thomas Kailath proposed the concept of Spatial Multiplexing using MIMO in 1993.

Their US Patent No. 5,345,599 issued 1994 on Spatial Multiplexing emphasized applications to wireless broadcast.

In 1996, Greg Raleigh and Gerard J. Foschini refine new approaches to MIMO technology.

Bell Labs was the first to demonstrate a laboratory prototype of SM in 1998.

In the commercial arena, Iospan Wireless Inc. developed the first commercial system in 2001 that used MIMO-OFDMA technology. Iospan technology supported both diversity coding and spatial multiplexing.

In 2006, several companies (Beceem Communications, Samsung, Runcom Technologies, etc.) have developed MIMO-OFDMA based solutions for IEEE 802.16e WIMAX broadband mobile standard.

Also in 2006, several companies (Broadcom, Intel,..) have fielded a MIMO-OFDM solution based on a pre-standard for IEEE 802.11n WiFi standard. Airgo had developed a pre-11n version in 2005.

All upcoming 4G systems will also employ MIMO technology. Several research groups have demonstrated over 1 Gbit/s prototypes.