Clearing the RF Smog: Making 802.11 Robust to Cross-Technology Interference Shyamnath Gollakota † Fadel Adib† Dina Katabi† Srinivasan Seshan⋆ † ⋆ Massachusetts Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University {gshyam, fadel, dina}@csail.mit.edu
[email protected] ABSTRACT frequency band as wide as 802.11, and all of them emit power that is Recent studies show that high-power cross-technology interfer- comparable or higher than 802.11 devices [17]. Further, the number ence is becoming a major problem in today’s 802.11 networks. De- and diversity of such interferers is likely to increase over time due vices like baby monitors and cordless phones can cause a wire- to the proliferation of new technologies in the ISM band. less LAN to lose connectivity. The existing approach for dealing Traditional solutions that increase resilience to interference by with such high-power interferers makes the 802.11 network switch making 802.11 fall down to a lower bit rate are ineffective against to a different channel; yet the ISM band is becoming increasingly high-power cross-technology interference. As a result, the most crowded with diverse technologies, and hence many 802.11 access common solution today is to hop away to an 802.11 channel that points may not find an interference-free channel. does not suffer from interference [6, 38, 31, 32]. However, the ISM This paper presents TIMO, a MIMO design that enables 802.11n band is becoming increasingly crowded, making it difficult to find to communicate in the presence of high-power cross-technology an interference-free channel.