Streaming IP video traffic over WiFi is quite different compared to streaming IP data traffic. First, to allow for service providers to offer WiFi as the home backbone for entertainment service – whole home coverage is required without any dead spots. Whole home coverage is an elusive target which depends not only on range but also on number of walls in the way and the material they are made of. North American homes are typically larger than European and Asian homes, however interior American walls are typically made of wood or plaster while European or Asian are brick walls. By nature video traffic is extremely sensitive to delays and packet loss which translate immediately into video artifacts. Therefore, even if range and coverage are achieved, guaranteed throughput and signal robustness with almost no packets loss (typically measured at better than one packet loss per hour of video watching) are required for successful video streaming. Overall, for a true wireless HD video home networking, a unique combination of range, robustness and guaranteed throughput need to be met at all times and in the dynamic environment of the home.

While the common perception in the industry has always been that 802.11 a/b/g WiFi technology fails to meet the stringent requirements for wireless video home networking, the expectations were that the emerging 802.11n standard will bridge the gap. But unfortunately, it is rare for even the advanced 802.11n based access points to effectively stream even a single SD video stream from the dent to the living room without any artifacts. Most of the progress achieved by 802.11n has been made in the area of burst throughput increase. While it is possible to use off the shelf AP’s and Adapters to stream video in very short distances, unfortunately as the distance grows, the affects of decreasing sustained throughput and robustness shows and quality of experience degrades. For a true wireless HD video home networking a leap beyond traditional MIMO is required.

One of the most common deployment architectures for service providers and consumer applications to date has been the use of external extenders or “dongles”. Such extenders would be attached to the video distribution point (for example, the computer network or a DSL Residential Gateway) and similar video extender clients will hang off the receiving points (most likely Media adapters or Set Top Boxes). This simple solution guarantees fast time to market and many other benefits that are described here. The industry also appreciates the cost benefits of fully integrated solutions and Celeno enabled Set Top Boxes, Residential Gateways and other Consumer Electronics devices are expected to be available shortly.

No. Celeno's unique value proposition is that one would need to “Celeno enable” only the Access Point distribution side, while using any 3rd party silicon on the client side. To take this even one step forward, performance is guaranteed 802.11n clients, as well with either multi antenna design or single antenna client design. This flexibility allows for Celeno’s partners to drive down the overall cost of solution to the benefit of the service provider and the end user.

The Celeno technology enables the home video backbone, connecting sources of IP video content to the various set top boxes or media adaptors around the house. The other wireless technologies mentioned above are complementary, being used to connect the last link of the Set top box or other consumer electronic components of the home theater such as DVD, Gaming console, etc. to the TV. From a technology point of view, Celeno provides a Wireless Ethernet infrastructure for data or video IP traffic connectivity, where the other technologies provide a Wireless HDMI link for video only traffic connectivity. As more and more video content is being delivered to the home in an IP based and compressed format, either from online sources or through the broadband network, WiFi is the de-facto technology for streaming this content around the house. The ubiquitous nature of IP even drives many TV set manufacturers to provide IP-enabled and WiFi-enabled TV’s.

No you won’t. The Celeno technology is a perfect replacement for cumbersome Ethernet cables. The Celeno technology ensures that no packet of information is lost. Thus, the video information received through your broadband connection will be streamed all the way to the Set top box where it will be decoded and sent as video signals to the TV set. Celeno WiFi technology sends the data "as is" without delay so Audio and Video are perfectly synched and your zapping experience remains unchanged.

Celeno’s WiFi solution architecture drives down the overall entertainment home network cost dramatically by implementing an industry’s unique solution topology. While most other WiFi solutions out there rely on a symmetric implementation of identical chipsets at both ends of the wireless link in order to ensure their top performance, Celeno’s solution topology achieves superior performance with a Celeno SoC enabling the Access Point and any other 3rd party WiFi chips at the clients’ side. But even more so, this top performance is guaranteed also with the most simple, basic client WiFi chipsets as the Celeno SoC bears all the computational burden and does not rely on any sophisticated protocols processing or expensive multiple antenna’s design. This unique proposition drives down the overall solution cost and the gap grows as the number of TV sets in the home increases.

Yes it is. Celeno OptimizAIR™ technology relies on standard 802.11 core and while it includes many unique algorithms for overall performance boost, it doesn’t rely on any proprietary messages. To the outside world and to any WiFi client out there, The OptimizAIR™ enabled device will look just like any other WiFi Access Point.

The CL1800 is a WiFi Baseband System on Chip that optimizes WiFi for reliable HD Video streaming for home networking applications. Reliable streaming of multiple HD streams throughout the house has been the “holy grail” of WIFI for many years. Standard 802.11 a/b/g or even 802.11n devices have proved inadequate due their inability to cover a typical home environment with multiple walls and multiple floors with consistent throughout and without packet loss which is crucial for perfect user experience. The CL1800 was designed to achieve exactly that. Powered by the innovative patent pending OptimizAIR™ technology CL1800 is able to reliably stream multiple HD streams throughout the entire house passing through multiple walls and multiple floors while maintaining consistent throughput and without losing packets, thus providing the perfect user experience

Any IP Video content point may use the CL1800 SoC to effectively stream it over WiFi around the home. These include, Residential Gateways, DVR/STB devices, Network Attached Storage devices and Media Servers. In addition, external video extenders may use the CL1800 SoC to effectively enable some of the above devices that might not be WiFi enabled yet – those external devices act as WiFi adaptors and connected as USB or Ethernet dongles.

OptimizAIR™is a set of algorithms implemented on top of standard 802.11 MAC and PHY that work intricately to achieve the performance required for carrier grade video distribution while remaining standards compliant. The technology will boost up performance of any 802.11n system. The OptimizAIR algorithms are implemented both in the silicon level as well as in firmware that runs on an embedded CPU inside the CL1800 SoC. The core technology includes a massive list of algorithms that work intricately at all layers to achieve the performance required for carrier-grade video distribution. PHY layer improvements such as our true packet-by-packet MIMO beam forming, antenna selection and channel aware transmission shaping increase the range, coverage and robustness of the system. MAC layer scheduling and QoS management ensures guaranteed throughput with minimal delay per each video stream, while other application layers ensure seamless interoperability into IPTV and DVR related applications such as support for full HD Trick modes, IPTV zapping, etc.

The CL1800 operates in the 4.9-5.85 GHz frequency band, according to each country’s specific regulations. These frequencies were allocated for public use worldwide, and users are not required to purchase licenses for them.

Yes. CL1800 SoC complies with both European (ETSI) and US (FCC) regulations. This includes EIRP limitations and DFS/TPC support in the relevant frequencies.

Very few home appliances operate in the 5GHz spectrum. Nevertheless, the Celeno OptimizAIR™technology detects any interfering device and automatically switches over to a cleaner channel. One of the advantages of OptimizAIR™ is its spectrum efficiency, enabling it to achieve superior performance based on a single 20MHz channel. As such, finding a clean spectrum is a much easier task and video streaming is less prone to unexpected noise patterns.

CL1800 SoC supports the WPA2 security protocol which implements CCMP, an AES based encryption algorithm that is considered fully secure. The encryption algorithm is implemented entirely in hardware and does not affect system performance.

We believe that QoS is only one of the important aspects of a successful, robust wireless video streaming solution. After all, if the transmitted power does not reach its client destination, the QoS algorithms will be useless. Celeno OptimizAIR™ takes a holistic view and optimizes all aspects involved including PHY, MAC, Networking and Application layers in order to make sure range, throughput, and robustness targets are met.

802.11e standard and the Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WMM) define a contention-based QoS scheme with basic classification system that uses statistical prioritization of high priority streams such as video streams over low priority streams such as data streams. This method does not ensure strict prioritization of video over data and therefore cannot guarantee consistent and timely delivery of video traffic. Moreover, it does not ensure fairness between the video streams. The definitions for automatic rules for the QoS categories classification are missing from the standard. It therefore relies heavily on user configurations, which contradicts IPTV operators' desire for a "plug and play" experience. Other proposed mechanisms such as HCCA provide more deterministic, controlled contention-free mechanism but relies on complex coordination function between the access point and the clients.

Celeno's OptimizAIR™ technology, implements an advanced QoS scheme which is contention-free, deterministic and guarantees data rate and jitter which was designed to be completely client agnostic (does not require client 802.11e or WMM collaboration) and to automatically assign the correct prioritization levels. Moreover, this unique design uses Channel Aware Scheduling to enforce guaranteed throughput and timely delivery of multiple HD video streams while maintaining fairness among them.