Pushing the envelope of indoor wireless spatial reuse using directional access points and clients

  • Authors:

  • Xi Liu;Anmol Sheth;Michael Kaminsky;Konstantina Papagiannaki;Srinivasan Seshan;Peter Steenkiste

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Intel Labs Seattle, Seattle, WA, USA;Intel Labs Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Intel Labs Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Recent work demonstrates that directional antennas have significant potential to improve wireless network capacity in indoor environments. This paper provides a broader exploration of the design space of indoor directional antenna systems along two main dimensions: antenna configuration and antenna control. Studying a number of alternative configurations, we find that directionality on APs and clients can significantly improve performance, even over other configurations with stronger directionality. Moreover, it is sufficient to have a small number of narrow beam antennas to achieve such gains, thus making such a solution practical for actual deployment. Designing systems with directional APs and clients for increased spatial reuse comes, however, with a number of challenges in the way the directional antennas are controlled. Antenna control needs to encompass antenna orientation algorithms, an appropriate MAC layer protocol, and novel client-AP association solutions. To overcome these challenges, we propose Speed, a distributed directional antenna control system that is easy to deploy and significantly improves network capacity over existing solutions.