Prediction of Wireless Network Signal Strength within a Building

With the increase in the provision of access to Wireless Local Area Networks and the abundance of user devices capable of utilising Wi-Fi, the design of the network infrastructure has introduced some significant problems. Prior to the installation of Access Points it is difficult to predict whether access can be guaranteed at specific locations. Additionally, to increase the level of security, it is often preferable, despite the use of security protocols, to ensure that the signal strength is not large enough to enable connection in areas other than those designated. By combining the theory of antennae and the measurement of the performance of devices, it is possible to predict whether access is likely and hence how secure the network design is. Additionally, the use of a simple application is proposed that enables the network designer to enter a configuration and produce an answer showing if WIFI will operate and a value to indicate the margin

Integrated Scheduling and Beam Steering for Spatial Reuse

This document describes an approach to integrating antenna selection and control into a time-division MAC scheduling process. I argue that through such integration it is possible to achieve greater spatial reuse and interference mitigation than by solving the two problems separately. Without coupling between the MAC scheduling and physical antenna configuration processes, a \u22chicken-and-egg\u22 problem exists: If antenna decisions are made before scheduling, they cannot be optimized for the communication that will actually occur. If, on the other hand, the scheduling decisions are made first, the scheduler cannot know what the actual interference and communications properties of the network will be. This dissertation presents algorithms for optimal spatial reuse TDMA scheduling with reconfigurable antennas. I present and solve the joint beam steering and scheduling problem for spatial reuse TDMA and describe an implemented system based on the algorithms developed. The algorithms described achieve up to a 600% speedup over TDMA in the experiments performed. This is based on using an optimization decomposition approach to arrive at a working distributed protocol which is equivalent to the original problem statement while also producing optimal solutions in an amount of time that is at worst linear in the size of the input. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first actually implemented STDMA scheduling system based on dual decomposition. This dissertation identifies and briefly address some of the challenges that arise in taking such a system from theory to reality