Indoor wireless networks of the future: Adaptive network architecture

Indoor wireless networks connect an increasing number of people to the Internet. Unfortunately, spectrum is limited, and the increasing traffic leads to increased interference. We propose a novel network architecture that reconfigures topologies and frequency bands, adapting to changing indoor traffic demands. The key idea is to have fixed antennas throughout a building, and adaptively switch the connections between these antennas and a number of signal processing units which are each able to handle a fixed number of frequency bands. Our new architecture requires less infrastructure, and frequency utilization is significantly more efficient than in current architectures. Also, our new architecture can be applied to existing wireless standards, including GSM and WLAN. Simulations show that the new architecture is able to improve network satisfaction regarding traffic demands by 75 percent and reduce infrastructure investment by 30 percent on a particular practical case study, compared to current techniques.