On the WiFi interference analysis based on sensor network measurements

Abstract

The Internet is everywhere, now everyone has at least one device which is connected to some kind of computer network. Not only wired but wireless communication technologies have become part of everyday life, as well. Because of the dynamic evolution of the WiFi services, majority of the enterprises and higher education institutions have a sort of own wireless infrastructure on their sites or campuses. Such subsystems in most cases are central managed, 2nd generation solutions consisting of high-end network devices from the top manufacturers. The IEEE 802.11 widespread technology is affordable for everyone in the ISM (Industrial-Science-Medical) frequency band. Many users have access to WiFi devices and make its own SOHO wireless service in ad-hoc manner in the neighborhood of the enterprise sites. These devices cause interference and generate huge amount of noise in the wireless radio channels for others in the physical vicinity. Improvement of an existing enterprise system without overall coverage in interior and exterior environment needs important design consideration to extend the WiFi services conform to the user expectation level. Having a large number of mobile users with even real-time communication necessities, high-quality, and high-bandwidth WiFi system with QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees need to be developed henceforward. Improvement of the WiFi base station infrastructure to cover the wanting physical zones can be done after a thoughtful frequency analysis of the existing enterprise wireless system. The paper presents a frequency analysis method based on sensor facility of the intelligent WiFi access points for helping the determination of the optimal physical coordinates of several dozens of new base stations in university or enterprise campus environment.