There are few things more frustrating than trying to use your phone on a crowded network. With phone usage growing faster than wireless spectrum, we’re all now fighting over smaller and smaller bits of bandwidth. Spectrum crunch is such a big problem that the White House is getting involved, recently announcing both a $400 million research initiative and a $4 million global competition devoted to the issue.

But researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) say that they have a possible solution. In a new paper, a team led by professor Dina Katabi demonstrate a system called MegaMIMO 2.0 that can transfer wireless data more than three times faster than existing systems while also doubling the range of the signal.



The soon-to-be-commercialized system’s key insight is to coordinate multiple access points at the same time, on the same frequency, without creating interference. This means that MegaMIMO 2.0 could dramatically improve the speed and strength of wireless networks, particularly at high-usage events like concerts, conventions and football games.

“In today’s wireless world, you can’t solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another,” says Ezzeldin Hamed, a PhD student who is lead author on a new paper on the topic. “The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum.”

To test MegaMIMO 2.0’s performance, the researchers created a mock conference room with a set of four laptops that each roamed the space atop Roomba robots. The experiments found that the system could increase the devices’ data-transfer speed 330 percent.

MegaMIMO 2.0’s hardware is the size of a standard router, and consists of a processor, a real-time baseband processing system, and a transceiver board.

Katabi and Hamed co-wrote the paper with Hariharan Rahul SM '99, PhD '13, an alum of Katabi’s group and visiting researcher with the group, as well as visiting student Mohammed A. Albdelghany. Rahul will present the paper at next week’s conference for the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM 16).

Read more: Solving network congestion | MIT News

Posted By: Brink
25 Aug 2016