<div dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/11/10/455386738/slow-wi-fi-fm-radio-might-help-with-that">http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/11/10/455386738/slow-wi-fi-fm-radio-might-help-with-that</a><br><br><div class="">
<h1>Slow Wi-Fi? FM Radio Might Help With That</h1>
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<span class="">November 10, 2015</span><span class=""> 1:11 PM ET</span>
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Alina Selyukh
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<p>If you live in an apartment building or another densely populated
area and your Wi-Fi is slow, your neighbors bingeing on Netflix may be
to blame.</p> <p>Your and your neighbors' Wi-Fi networks have a
limited number of wireless frequency channels to move your data. And
when things get crowded and busy, Wi-Fi networks can overlap and bump
into each other and slow down your Internet connection.</p> <p>"I'm
doing something, you're doing something, but none of us have a reference
point about when the other party will do something or not," says
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, <a href="http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/%7Eakuzma/" target="_blank">associate professor</a> of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, describing how Wi-Fi devices might operate.</p> <p>"There's
no sense of timing, no sense of coordination. And hence, I listen a
little bit, I don't hear, I send something. This may create trouble to
you because you just sent something. And then we both back off. There
could be time wasted before somebody grabs the airtime," he says.</p> <p>Looking for a way to organize this common discord, Kuzmanovic and his colleagues Marcel Flores and Uri Klarman <a href="http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2015/11/using-fm-to-improve-wireless-networks.html" target="_blank">have found</a> an interesting aide: FM radio.</p> <div id="res455479711" class="">
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<p>It's not a simple app to install on your phone, but the
researchers say they've developed the first system for Wi-Fi devices to
coordinate for everyone's benefit without explicit communication or
human involvement. And it comes over FM — strong enough to reliably
travel through walls and ubiquitous enough that many devices are already
geared to receive it.</p> <p>Knowing that Wi-Fi devices already hear
each other over Wi-Fi frequencies, the scientists looked for a way to
help the devices harmonize.</p> <p>That's where FM radio comes in.</p> <p>When
you're listening to the radio, say, in your car, your display may show
the name of the artist and song playing on the station, or sometimes
traffic and weather alerts. That information arrives over a digital
signal, called the Radio Data System or RDS, which travels right beside
the broadcast signal.</p> <p>RDS data, Kuzmanovic explains, have a
signal structure that delivers bits of information in a series that
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<p>So if Wi-Fi networks can converge on the same RDS (by scanning the
FM dial for the lowest-frequency radio station with a strong enough
signal), they can use it to harmonize their time-telling.</p> <p>"Devices
are able to detect that there is this particular repeating structure
and hence they are all able to independently come to the conclusion that
hey, this must be the beginning of this particular RDS signal sequence
that's repeating in time," Kuzmanovic tells All Tech.</p> <p>"And then
once they come to that particular point ... they divide the time into
particular time slots and then they listen to how others are behaving
relative to these time slots and that further determines their own
behavior — when will they send data, when they will not send data," he
says.</p> <p>Put simply, the RDS signal acts as a clock for Wi-Fi
devices to time the quietest slot — and we're talking milliseconds —
during which to send data.</p> <p>The researchers dub this technique Wi-FM, describing it in <a href="http://networks.cs.northwestern.edu/publications/wifm/icnp2015-flores.pdf" target="_blank">a new paper</a> presented Tuesday at the <a href="http://icnp15.cs.ucr.edu/" target="_blank">IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols</a> in San Francisco.</p> <div id="res455479713" class="">
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<p>The paper outlines one possible scheduling algorithm that would
help Wi-Fi devices coordinate by using an FM signal. But as with many
things in the industry, Kuzmanovic says others could come up with
alternative approaches to reach the same goals with some universal
parameters.</p> <p>And while individually people could start adapting
software on their Wi-Fi devices to adopt the Wi-FM technique, Kuzmanovic
says the system would work best industrywide. His hope is for Google or
Apple to spread the idea through its operating system, though he hasn't
heard from the industry yet.</p>
</div><br><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Glenn McKnight<br><a href="mailto:mcknight.glenn@gmail.com" target="_blank">mcknight.glenn@gmail.com</a><br>skype gmcknight<br>twitter gmcknight<br>.</div></div></div>
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