MIT Researchers Radically Boost Wi-Fi With Smart Routers That Talk To Each Other
Look at the night sky on a camping trip and the stars are everywhere. Look from a city full of lights and you barely see any. The disappointment is similar when you go from a Wi-Fi network in isolation to one crowded with dozens, maybe hundreds, of other users. The problem, in both cases, is interference: signals crashing into each other. Adding more Wi-Fi access points, or APs, to extend the coverage area can cause more collisions, since they are all fighting over the same limited spectrum.
Now MIT researchers say they've found a fix: getting APs to anticipate how they will collide and tweak the signals to undo the damage. In today's world of busy Wi-Fi networks, the way to avoid a crash is to take turns, like cars meeting at a four-way stop sign.
"If you're the only person, you get to send [data] all the time," says Hariharan Rahul, a visiting researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "If there are two people you get to send ... about half the time. As there are more and more people, you get less and less opportunities to send."
Rahul worked with two PhD students and professor Dina Katabi on a new solution: Instead of avoiding collisions, take advantage of them.
fastcompany.com
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