Channel Adapted Antenna Augmentation for Improved Wi-Fi Throughput

Abstract

This paper investigates how the expansion of array size may improve the spatial diversity of state-of-the-art Wi-Fi system and increase its throughput. With comprehensive Wi-Fi measurement studies with augmented antennas, we identify the potential performance gain atop spatial diversity gains from existing technologies like MIMO and beamforming. We propose WINAS, a general Wi-Fi intelligent antenna selection scheme with full system implementation that can be easily integrated with commodity Wi-Fi AP. WINAS provides substantially improved throughput for downlink traffics. Our experimental evaluation suggests that WINAS improves Wi-Fi throughput up to 1.56x, and 1.47x in average, in real user-based evaluation.