Researchers Found a Way to Improve Wi-Fi

Researchers at the University of Stanford claimed they had found a way of improving Wi-Fi reception. One of the problems of Wi-Fi is that it can be buggered up when there are too many people packed into one building, but the researchers seem to have found a way to solve this problem.

The researchers claimed they have found a way to turn crowding into an advantage. With a dorm on the Stanford campus, the researchers created a single, dense Wi-Fi infrastructure which each resident could use and manage like his or her own private network. They called the network BeHop, and said it could be be centrally managed for maximum performance and efficiency with users keeping assigning their own SSIDs (service set identifiers), passwords and other settings.
According to Yiannis Yiakoumis, a Stanford doctoral student who first presented the research at the Open Networking Summit, the whole network can be managed with cheap consumer-grade access points and software-defined networking.
In the meantime, we all know that each household installs its own Wi-Fi network with a wired broadband link out to the Internet. Now it is clear that each of those networks may be powerful enough to allow for good performance under optimal circumstances within the owner’s unit, while it may suffer from interference with all the other privately run networks in the nearby apartment.
The researchers built a shared network of access point using home units provided by NetGear. Yiakoumis and his colleagues modified the firmware of those access points, and using SDN, they virtualized the private aspects of the network. In their experiment, residents could name and secure their own virtual networks like they had bought and plugged in a router in their own rooms. Hopefully, their research will help to improve Wi-Fi at everyone’s homes.