Understanding Wireless Interference in the Unlicensed Band

Опубликовано 12 августа 2016, 0:12

Current indoor wireless environments comprise a complex ecosystem hosting a plethora of wireless devices including WiFi-enabled devices, and many other non-WiFi RF devices such as Bluetooth devices, microwave ovens, game controllers, wireless cameras and cordless phones. Such a setting involving interaction between distributed entities (each with a limited view of the spectrum) that often employ incompatible or inefficient protocols, frequently results in severe wireless interference. This interference remains the primary reason why wireless networks, unlike their wired brethren, exhibit unpredictable performance and offer significantly lower throughput. Hence, an important step towards building future wireless systems is to better understand and manage such interference. In this talk, I will show how we can build systems and tools that help us understand interference in indoor wireless environments. Specifically, I will talk about two systems that we built: Airshark and WiFiNet. Together, these systems can detect, localize, and quantify the interference impact of various non-WiFi interference sources in real-time and using commodity WiFi hardware alone. Airshark is a software solution that can run on top of a commodity WiFi Access Point (AP) and can detect multiple simultaneously active non-WiFi RF devices. It has an average detection accuracy of 91-96 of the ground truth and the median localization error is 4 meters. We believe systems such as Airshark and WiFiNet can empower wireless network administrators with new tools that help diagnose non-WiFi interference issues in enterprise wireless environments.