Clearing the Rf Smog: Making 802.11 Robust to Cross-Technology Interference
Author(s)
Gollakota, Shyamnath; Adib, Fadel M.; Katabi, Dina; Seshan, Srinivasan
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Recent studies show that high-power cross-technology interference
is becoming a major problem in today’s 802.11 networks. Devices
like baby monitors and cordless phones can cause a wireless
LAN to lose connectivity. The existing approach for dealing
with such high-power interferers makes the 802.11 network switch
to a different channel; yet the ISM band is becoming increasingly
crowded with diverse technologies, and hence many 802.11 access
points may not find an interference-free channel.
This paper presents TIMO, a MIMO design that enables 802.11n
to communicate in the presence of high-power cross-technology
interference. Unlike existing MIMO designs, however, which require
all concurrent transmissions to belong to the same technology,
TIMO can exploit MIMO capabilities to decode in the presence
of a signal from a different technology, hence enabling diverse
technologies to share the same frequency band. We implement a
prototype of TIMO in GNURadio-USRP2 and show that it enables
802.11n to communicate in the presence of interference from baby
monitors, cordless phones, and microwave ovens, transforming scenarios
with a complete loss of connectivity to operational networks.
Date issued
2011-08Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2011 conference, SIGCOMM
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Gollakota, Shyamnath et al. “Clearing the RF Smog.” Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), August 15–19, 2011, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ACM Press, 2011. 170.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
978-1-4503-0797-0