[Tech] Mystery Solved: Get Faster Wi-Fi Through Wi-FM

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“Most people think it’s a mystery,” says Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern. “They get upset at their routers. But what’s really happening is that your neighbor is watching Netflix.” Confused? Well, that is the truth. When many Wi-Fi signals are transmitted simultaneously, as will inevitably be the case in today’s world, the data packets (data is transferred by a system of packets) collide and back off. They slow down, and the process of signal propagation is delayed, hence the inexplicable slow Wi-Fi speeds

Now researchers from the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University have come up with a simple way to prevent this – and improve Wi-Fi speeds – by using Frequency Modulation (FM) and a smart time-sharing system that maximizes data throughput. This involves a whole lot of management, optimisation and ingenuity.

Dubbed Wi-FM by its creators, the system aims to prevent a person’s network data from competing with a neighbor’s data when packets of network data are transmitted at the same time. They take the help of FM, which is mostly inbuilt everywhere, in every device. The protocols used in Wi-FM allow the monitoring of the network and select time slots that are the least busy. That is when the FM radio signals are transmitted. “It will listen and send data when the network is quietest,” says PhD student Marcel Flores. “It can send its data right away without running into someone else or spending any time backing off. That’s where the penalty happens that wastes the most time.”

The existing Wi-Fi signals can communicate with each other by syncing the device in question to the digital information transmitted on the RDS (Radio Data System) section of a transmitted FM signal. The RDS contains information about the times of broadcasts to be made, the signals of which the McCormick Engineering team uses to allow their system to determine the “quiet” intervals in which the Wi-FM can transmit with the least interference.

“Our wireless networks are completely separate from each other,” says Flores. “They don’t have any way to talk to each other even though they are all approximately in the same place. We tried to think about ways in which devices in the same place could implicitly communicate. FM is everywhere.”

So that covers optimisation and ingenuity. The management part? Seeing as the system monitor other network to determine the time and amount of traffic, the patterns could be changed autonomously without any human intervention. “Our system can solve these problems without involving real people,” says Kuzmanovic. “Because are you going to knock on 30 doors to coordinate your wireless network with your neighbors? That is a huge management problem that we are able to bypass.”

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