Rice University researchers say Argos, a multi-antenna technology they developed, could help operators keep pace with voracious user demand for mobile data. According to the researchers, who are working on Argos with other researchers from Bell Labs and Yale University, Argos presents new techniques in multi-user beamforming and can dramatically increase network capacity. A prototype built at Rice this year uses 64 antennas to allow a single wireless base station to communicate directly to 15 different users simultaneously with narrowly focused directional beams. In tests at Rice, Argos allowed a single base station to track and send highly directional beams to more than a dozen users on the same frequency at the same time. Details about Argos were presented last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul. For more on the Argos prototype, check out this release.