Abstract

Conventional thinking treats the wireless channel as a given constraint, so wireless networks to date center on the problem optimizing the communication endpoints. We instead explore whether it is possible to reconfigure the environment itself to facilitate wireless communication. In this work, we instrument the environment with a large array of inexpensive antennas (LAIA) and design algorithms to configure them in real time. We design and deploy a 36-element passive array in a real indoor home environment. Experiments with this prototype show that, by reconfiguring the wireless environment, we can achieve a 24% TCP throughput improvement on average and a median improvement of 51.4% in Shannon capacity over the baseline single-antenna links. Over the baseline multi-antenna links, LAIA achieves an improvement of 12.23% to 18.95% in Shannon capacity.

Speaker Bio

Kyle Jamieson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and Honorary Reader at University College London. His research focuses on building mobile and wireless systems for sensing, localization, and communication that cut across the boundaries of digital communications and networking. He received the B.S. (Mathematics, Computer Science), M. Eng. (Computer Science and Engineering), and Ph.D. (Computer Science, 2008) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then received a Starting Investigator fellowship from the European Research Council, a Google Faculty Research Award, and the ACM SIGMOBILE Early Career Award. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Networking from 2018 to 2020.