Wireless Technology
Self-organizing Wi-Fi mesh architecture for the future of connected homes
By Livia M. Rosu, prpl Foundation member, explains more F
ollowing the work-from-home and learn-from-home revolution that occurred during the pandemic, good Wi-Fi coverage is essential throughout modern “connected” homes. Best practice for good coverage means using a “mesh” of multiple Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) to blanket the coverage area, leaving no undesirable “dead” spots. That much is clear, but the methods used to deploy mesh Wi-Fi inside homes are quite different from the methods enterprises would use. Enterprises demand good Wi-Fi coverage throughout their facilities, traditionally employing professional IT people to plan the deployment of multiple access points: where to best locate those APs, how to get power to them, how to get backhaul traffic distributed to them, and much more. Such site- planning is a luxury that enterprises can afford but would be cost-prohibitive for deployment across millions of consumers’ homes.
Residential Wi-Fi mesh
The architecture that works best for connected homes is a self-organizing Wi-Fi mesh. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can offer to their subscribers a handful of so-called smart Wi-Fi “Extender” APs for the homeowner to place throughout their home. Wi-Fi extender APs act like Wi-Fi sprinklers to cover what otherwise might be dead spots. Each AP provides a sphere of coverage that is limited in extent, hence multiple overlapping spheres are deployed to cover the whole home. By overlapping the spheres of coverage, this enables the possibility of the APs to communicate with each other in a multi-hop mesh fashion.
Following placement, it becomes the responsibility of those devices to self-organize themselves into a mesh distribution system to optimize their coverage throughout the home. This involves communicating between themselves and the ISP-provided modem/ gateway to the Internet/WAN (wide-area network). All the Wi-Fi devices in the home can report their capabilities and measurements of the local Wi-Fi environment to identify interference or occupied/congested Wi-Fi channels. At that point, intelligent decision- making algorithms can process all those capabilities and environmental metrics, then
34 July/August 2022 Self-organization
The self-organizing aspects of the solution automatically arrange the backhaul links into a mesh topology that automatically adapts to the unique layout of walls and other obstacles inside each home. Similarly, the mesh network can intelligently “steer” the user’s devices to communicate over optimal fronthaul links. Optimization includes automatically selecting the best-performing channels in the best Wi-Fi bands (e.g., 2.4GHz, 5GHz or 6GHz spectrum) to communicate over. Each Wi-Fi band has its own considerations that go into the intelligent decision-making, such as clear channel availability, channel-widths, and the ability of the Wi-Fi signal to penetrate through intervening walls. The intelligent software can also provide hints that helps the homeowner to optimally place the Extender APs, given the unique situation in each home. As a result, each user/device in the home enjoys better Wi- Fi signal quality by being closer to an extender AP than what could be expected from just a single AP.
Using open-source Wi-Fi mesh software
There is the small matter of programming that can automatically perform all such
Components in Electronics go to work to self-organize the mesh.
Backhaul and fronthaul An internet service provider (ISP) typically provides gateway customer premises equipment (CPE) to access an internet wide area network (WAN). The connection is shared throughout a single dwelling over a Wi-Fi mesh network that serves as a distribution system. These so-called backhaul links then distribute the Internet traffic to each Extender AP. The most remote extender is positioned out of range from the gateway and requires a double-hop through one of the less remote extenders (over two different backhaul links). These so-called fronthaul links are the Wi-Fi connections that individual devices “see” and connect to from their location in a home. Mobile devices that roam with a user from one location to another in the home will similarly have their Wi-Fi connection follow from one extender AP to another.
Each Wi-Fi Extender AP provides a limited and overlapping sphere of coverage (gray circles). Internet WAN traffic gets distributed over multi-hop backhaul links (purple arrows). The fronthaul links (green lines) are Wi-Fi links that individual client devices “see” and connect to.
optimizations with little or no interaction from the homeowner. Fortunately, organizations like the prpl Foundation are developing open- source software to satisfy the requirements of ISPs, in order to deploy self-organizing Wi-Fi mesh to millions of their subscribers. The software, like the Foundation’s prplMesh solution, implements and tracks the evolution of many open industry standards from organizations like the Wi-Fi Alliance, the Broadband Forum, and
IEEE.org, thereby obviating the need for any vendor-proprietary Wi-Fi mesh solutions.
The software provides ISPs with a fully manageable, carrier-grade, subscriber- focused solution that is portable across many CPE designs incorporating current and next- gen chipsets. These solutions are flexible enough to support backhaul links that can be wireless as well as wired over cables such as Ethernet, MoCA as defined by Multimedia over Coax Alliance and
G.hn as defined by HomeGrid Forum. Ethernet is the standard wired technology generally recognized as suitable for backhaul links, but it requires dedicated cables between the gateway and extender apps. Fortunately, other backhaul technologies function very much like Ethernet but use existing wiring widely found in homes, thereby avoiding the expense and headache of installing dedicated Ethernet cables. MoCA is a high-speed communication standard that shares the pre-existing coaxial cables found in most homes for carrying cable TV programming. MoCA shares those cables to transport backhaul traffic between mesh Wi-Fi
devices at Ethernet-like throughput speeds.
G.hn technology operates over almost any type of wiring available in residential environments, such as AC power lines, coaxial cables and twisted-pairs (e.g., phone-line cables). Transporting backhaul traffic over the existing AC powerlines with
G.hn technology is particularly convenient because mesh Wi-Fi devices (i.e., gateway and extenders) are all AC-powered. As such, any power socket can become a potential location for a high-performance mesh Wi-Fi access point.
Open-source software also includes interfaces to the cloud that enable ISPs to remotely diagnose Wi-Fi trouble-calls, then remotely manage solutions, hopefully without requiring “truck-rolls” to the subscribers’ premises.
Reliable connectivity throughout the home
Gone are the days when consumers were disappointed that a single Wi-Fi AP could not provide whole-home broadband coverage. With the growing number of use cases for Wi- Fi and their ever-increasing requirements for performance and reliability, ISPs have turned to intelligent self-organizing multiple-AP Wi-Fi mesh solutions. Solutions such as prplMesh free open-source software and leveraging the wired backbone do provide good broadband Wi-Fi coverage throughout the home, with remote management, which helps ISPs with service delivery and subscriber retention.
https://prplfoundation.org/ www.cieonline.co.uk
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