Wi-Fi networks (i.e., Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 standards) have become ubiquitous. People use them in their homes, at work, and in public spaces such as schools, cafes, even parks. Wi-Fi provides great convenience by eliminating wires and allowing for mobility. The applications that consumers run over Wi-Fi is continually expanding. Today people use Wi-Fi to carry all sorts of media, including video traffic, audio traffic, telephone calls, video conferencing, online gaming, and security camera video. Often traditional data services are also simultaneously in use, such as web browsing, file upload/download, disk drive backups, and any number of mobile device applications. In fact, Wi-Fi has become the primary connection between user devices and the Internet in the home or other locations. The vast majority of connected devices use Wi-Fi for their primary network connectivity.
Despite Wi-Fi's popularity and ubiquity, many consumers still experience difficulties with Wi-Fi. The challenges of supplying real-time media applications, like those listed above, put increasing demands on the throughput, latency, jitter, and robustness of Wi-Fi. Studies have shown that broadband access to the Internet through service providers is up 99.9% of the time at high data rates. However, despite the Internet arriving reliably and fast to the edge of consumer's homes, simply distributing the connection across the home via Wi-Fi is much less reliable leading to poor user experience.
Several issues prevent conventional Wi-Fi systems from performing well, including i) interference, ii) congestion, and iii) coverage. For interference, with the growth of Wi-Fi has come the growth of interference between different Wi-Fi networks which overlap. When two networks within range of each other carry high levels of traffic, they interfere with each other, reducing the throughput that either network can achieve. For congestion, within a single Wi-Fi network, there may be several communications sessions running. When several demanding applications are running, such as high definition video streams, the network can become saturated, leaving insufficient capacity to support the video streams.
For coverage, Wi-Fi signals attenuate with distance and when traveling through walls and other objects. In many environments, such as residences, reliable Wi-Fi service cannot be obtained in all rooms. Even if a basic connection can be obtained in all rooms, many of those locations will have poor performance due to a weak Wi-Fi signal. Various objects in a residence such as walls, doors, mirrors, people, and general clutter all interfere and attenuate Wi-Fi signals leading to slower data rates.
Two general approaches have been tried to improve the performance of conventional Wi-Fi systems. The first approach is to simply build more powerful single access points, in an attempt to cover a location with stronger signal strengths, thereby providing more complete coverage and higher data rates at a given location. However, this approach is limited by both regulatory limits on the allowed transmit power, and by the fundamental laws of nature. The difficulty of making such a powerful access point, whether by increasing the power, or increasing the number of transmit and receive antennas, grows exponentially with the achieved improvement. Practical improvements using these techniques lie in the range of 6 to 12 dB. However, a single additional wall can attenuate by 12 dB. Therefore, despite the huge difficulty and expense to gain 12 dB of link budget, the resulting system may not be able to transmit through even one additional wall. Any coverage holes that may have existed will still be present, devices that suffer poor throughput will still achieve relatively poor throughput, and the overall system capacity will be only modestly improved. In addition, this approach does nothing to improve the situation with interference and congestion. In fact, by increasing the transmit power, the amount of interference between networks actually goes up.
A second approach is to use repeaters or a mesh of Wi-Fi devices to repeat the Wi-Fi data throughout a location. This approach is a fundamentally better approach to achieving better coverage. By placing even a single repeater node in the center of a house, the distance that a single Wi-Fi transmission must traverse can be cut in half, halving also the number of walls that each hop of the Wi-Fi signal must traverse. This can make a change in the link budget of 40 dB or more, a huge change compared to the 6 to 12 dB type improvements that can be obtained by enhancing a single access point as described above. Mesh networks have similar properties as systems using Wi-Fi repeaters. A fully interconnected mesh adds the ability for all the repeaters to be able to communicate with each other, opening the possibility of packets being delivered via multiple hops following an arbitrary pathway through the network.
State of the art mesh or repeaters systems still have many limitations. Because the systems depend on localized control, they configure themselves to use the same frequency for all the backhaul communication between the repeaters or mesh nodes. This creates a severe system capacity problem. Consider a system that requires three hops through the network to get its packet to the destination. Since all three hops are on the same frequency channel, and because only one Wi-Fi radio can transmit at a time on a given channel among devices that are in range (where the range is determined by the long range of the lowest supported data rate), only one hop can be active at a time. Therefore, for this example, delivering a packet via three hops would consume three times the airtime on the one channel as delivering the packet directly. In the first hop, when the packet is moving from the Wi-Fi gateway to the first mesh node, all the other links in the house would need to stay silent. Similarly, as the packet is later sent from the first mesh node to a second mesh node, no other Wi-Fi devices in the home could transmit. Finally, the same would be true as the packet is moved from the second mesh node to the final destination. In all, the use of three hop repeating has reduced the network capacity by a factor of three. And, as with the case of a single access point, the repeater or mesh approach does nothing to help with the problems of interference or congestion. As before, the technique actually increases interference, as a single packet transmission becomes three separate transmissions, taking a total of 3× the airtime, generating 3× the interference to neighboring Wi-Fi networks.