The Wi-Fi project 6
Our solution will not rely on remote collection of metadata sent from the users over non-encrypted lines to cloud servers abroad, in conflict with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), such as in existing solutions. A cluster is typically an apartment building with users that disturb each other. All these users generates shared neighborhood reports, resulting in autonomous clusters where channels assigned in a completely decentralized fashion. Since the cluster size is limited and independent of the number of networks to be coordinated, our system will be scalable. Our project will enable Access Points (APs) to work in a completely autonomous peer to peer manner, making our system scalable and being able to operate without the need of any additional infrastructure and without the assistance of an Internet Service Provider, still achieving the performance of managed enterprise networks. We have already implemented and tested our ideas using WI-Fi 5. Now we will test it in a Wi-Fi 6 network, which can offer higher bit-rates since the channel access scheme uses OFDMA and can remove interference from neighbors if implemented correctly. This will be a significant breakthrough.
Graphs
The problem of channel allocation can be formulated as a graph coloring problem. In Wi-Fi 5, an AP is represented by a vertex which shall be assigned a given color (channel), while the edges represent disturbances between the APs.
In Wi-Fi 6, a vertex represents each client and the edges represent disturbances between clients and APs. The Vertex Coloring approach} is a well-known, but time-consuming solution to implement. The same channel cannot be assigned to two different vertices if there is an edge with a significant weight connecting them, where this weight is estimated based on the level of interference etc. Those nodes that do not use our algorithms and software are called rogues, therefore, they are vertices with fixed colors. The performance increases gracefully when the number of rouges is reduced.
The Master thesis
In Wi-Fi 6 the graph coloring task is very time consuming. There are however, tricks which makes it possible to implement this in an AP. The task is to perform simulations on how to do channel allocation for Wi-Fi 6. There will be a panel of experts from the Empathic Radio project, following, advising and supporting the Master candidate.