Briefly describe how this technology works and why it may be very important for future WLANs?

Nortel has done a lot of work to do this on their website, so go look there. It starts with WiMax, which is already a major step beyong WiFi. It applies a whole bunch of already known technology to solve common problems of wireless network access. There's a lot of work going on in the wireless network area. I can't say how this ranks among all the other work going on. Ask 10 experts a question like this, and you'll get 15 answers.