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The Myth of Spatial Reuse with Directional Antennas in Indoor Wireless Networks

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 6032))

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Abstract

Interference among co-channel users is a fundamental problem in wireless networks, which prevents nearby links from operating concurrently. Directional antennas allow the radiation patterns of wireless transmitters to be shaped to form directed beams. Conventionally, such beams are assumed to improve the spatial reuse (i.e. concurrency) in indoor wireless networks. In this paper, we use experiments in an indoor office setting of Wifi Access points equipped with directional antennas, to study their potential for interference mitigation and spatial reuse. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we observe that the interference mitigation benefits of directional antennas are minimal. On analyzing our experimental traces we observe that directional links do not reduce interference to nearby links due to the lack of signal confinement due to indoor multipath fading. We then use the insights derived from our study to develop an alternative approach that provides better interference reduction in indoor networks compared to directional links.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.

    Sriram Lakshmanan & Raghupathy Sivakumar

  2. NEC Labs. America, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A.

    Karthikeyan Sundaresan & Sampath Rangarajan

Authors
  1. Sriram Lakshmanan
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  2. Karthikeyan Sundaresan
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  3. Sampath Rangarajan
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  4. Raghupathy Sivakumar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, 185 Stevens Way, Seattle, 98195, WA, USA

    Arvind Krishnamurthy

  2. Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, CH-8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bernhard Plattner

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lakshmanan, S., Sundaresan, K., Rangarajan, S., Sivakumar, R. (2010). The Myth of Spatial Reuse with Directional Antennas in Indoor Wireless Networks. In: Krishnamurthy, A., Plattner, B. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6032. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12334-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12334-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12333-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12334-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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