Pushing the envelope of indoor wireless spatial reuse using directional access points and clients

Abstract

Recent work demonstrates that directional antennas have significant potential to improve wireless network capacity in indoor environments. This paper provides a broader exploration of the design space of indoor directional antenna systems along two main dimensions: antenna configuration and antenna control. Studying a number of alternative configurations, we find that directionality on APs and clients can significantly improve performance, even over other configurations with stronger directionality. Moreover, it is sufficient to have a small number of narrow beam antennas to achieve such gains, thus making such a solution practical for actual deployment. Designing systems with directional APs and clients for increased spatial reuse comes, however, with a number of challenges in the way the directional antennas are controlled. Antenna control needs to encompass antenna orientation algorithms, an appropriate MAC layer protocol, and novel client-AP association solutions. To overcome these challenges, we propose Speed, a distributed directional antenna control system that is easy to deploy and significantly improves network capacity over existing solutions.